Better to just dump the whole disc with CloneCD or Alcohol if you want a playable copy, they can save in bin/cue, ccd or mds/mdf formats. Be aware that v2 of mds/mdf is only supported by modern daemon tools and alcohol so is a largely useless proprietary format, that they use to paywall their software.

If you want preservation level copy then DIC (Disc Image Creator) and a supported Plextor drive.

ImgDrive is probably the best free virtual drive, followed by WinCDEmu.

Yes, but I was using DOSBOX and scripting/frontend to mount the images, without having a drive emulator in windows and mounting and unmounting constantly.

Lots of ways to save disc images, but putting them in the most useful format for me was the goal. I got them in a format now that lets me enjoy them much easier. Hope someone finds it useful for their setup.

CMDLineKing wrote:

I have been ripping my old dos games down to launch on DOSBox, but I kept running into issues with Redbook CD Audio. I used several different programs to Clone the discs in various formats, but even discs without protections would run into weird errors after mounting. I could copy the contents down and create a generic ISO and the issues went away, but of course I lost CD Audio, due to ISO's being unable to have audio tracks.

I've seen ISO files with audio but they may have been some weird non-standard stuff. I think Isobuster can rip a CD into ISO+CUE with audio but I don't know if such images are supported by common virtual drive software.

junglemontana wrote:

I've seen ISO files with audio but they may have been some weird non-standard stuff. I think Isobuster can rip a CD into ISO+CUE with audio but I don't know if such images are supported by common virtual drive software.

Yeah, this was just for DOSBox imgmount. Figured I would share in case other people were having some challenges in getting smooth playback, not intended to replace archiving attempts, just play.

I ran into a similar problem lately. Not only does DOSBox support WAV for the audio tracks, it supports Ogg Vorbis and FLAC too! FLAC is lossless so identical in quality to WAV. The only difference is it takes up less space cause of the lossless compression. It's really more akin to something like ZIP for audio rather than lossy formats like MP3 or Ogg. I'm sure you know this, but I'm being extra clear for the sake of others who might read the thread and not know.

I'm assuming you're using Windows, so maybe this will not be helpful, but I made a shell script a while ago that can extract audio tracks from BIN files. It will also strip the audio tracks from the BIN file, leaving only the data track. You can still access the data track from within DOSBox even though the image file is not ISO, and BIN is to be preferred since it preserves absolutely all of the binary data that's on the disc. In some cases, using ISO will trigger copy protection.

The audio tracks will be encoded to either FLAC or Ogg Vorbis, depending on what argument you give to the script. The script produces CUE sheets that are ready to be used with DOSBox. They preserve all information from the original CUE, like PREGAP commands for example. So, the original disc layout can be re-created if the CUE was to be burned to a disc. And the CUE sheets include the newly created FLAC or Ogg files, so there's no need for manual editing to add them.

I've been using the script to save some space for DOS games that have CD audio.

I hope it will be helpful to at least someone:

https://github.com/linux4ever07/scripts/blob/ … ebin_extract.sh

* EDIT *

I just discovered someone else on this forum has made a similar tool. It works for Windows!

A New tool to encode CUE/BIN Audio easily
https://github.com/john32b/cbae

It's part of the cue format, a 'iso' is just a mode1/2048 track iirc. So there is nothing 'nonstandard' about it, except if the programs you're using are terrible. Mind you, the information/bytes lost by the iso format is not 'regained' or anything. It's just that information is rarely used for anything but error correction (unnecessary for digital formats) and old DRM schemes (that are not applicable to DOS).

You'll also see this transformation done often in game hacks of SEGA console games for some reason or other. Maybe because there are available programs to recreate a iso and not so many to recreate a bin after replacing/inserting files.

Using flac for audio is more unusual but that's just because a lot of cue/bin handling programs are too ancient and flac is a relatively not so old format.

I never implied you could regain data if it has been removed by a file already being saved in ISO format, but it IS lost if you have a BIN file ripped straight from the disc and you then convert that to an ISO. If you're interested in making copies of discs and be able to perfectly reproduce the layout of those discs later through burning, then ISO is not going to do it.

I know there's modes to use 2048 sector size for data tracks, but how many commercially released games that are in mixed mode have you seen that use that (2048) mode? I've seen none. That's why I said non-standard. Even though the format allows it, it's *never* used, except if the game doesn't use CD audio at all and it's all data.

About using FLAC as audio. Unless you use burning software that was made last century, it's able to decode the FLAC files to WAV on the fly in the process of burning, and they will be put on the disc as normal CD audio.