Okay, testing has shown that there's no music files for some reason. The game installs and plays perfectly fine, which is great. But for some reason there's no music. Hopefully it's just a matter of mounting the correct image this time and re-creating it with music tracks. I must have mounted the wrong one the first time. I'll mount it to the virtual drive and try playing it in a media player.

Some old game CD's are actually tricky to duplicate properly because they contain BOTH data and music layers, the later of which often isn't preseved when you rip them.

I.E. You can take the CD for Age of Empires II and insert it into any CD player, and the player will play the soundtrack, just like any other music disc.

The ripper clonecd should handle all of this, you shouldn't need to use any settings but choosing that it's a prtoected pc game type. If you ended up with ccd file and then tried to convert that to another format you might have lost some data. It's been a little while since I've done this having finished my project a year ago, so I'm a little rusty on the specific process. I'll take a look at my backups to refresh my memory

Alexraptor wrote on 2026-02-02, 18:18:

Some old game CD's are actually tricky to duplicate properly because they contain BOTH data and music layers, the later of which often isn't preseved when you rip them.

I.E. You can take the CD for Age of Empires II and insert it into any CD player, and the player will play the soundtrack, just like any other music disc.

That is what this thread is about. Music on a CD like this is referred to as "Redbook Audio" as the title of the thread says.

Also, they aren't on separate layers. The data usually occupies one track (which may take up most of the disc) while the audio tracks are separate, but they are all on the same layer. Adding redbook audio tracks (music) means there is less room for data, and vice versa.

DustyShinigami wrote on 2026-02-02, 18:02:

Okay, testing has shown that there's no music files for some reason. The game installs and plays perfectly fine, which is great. But for some reason there's no music. Hopefully it's just a matter of mounting the correct image this time and re-creating it with music tracks. I must have mounted the wrong one the first time. I'll mount it to the virtual drive and try playing it in a media player.

You said it uses redbook audio.

Does your virtual cd drive support CD:DA for redbook? Not all of them do!

wierd_w wrote on 2026-02-02, 18:37:

You said it uses redbook audio.

Does your virtual cd drive support CD:DA for redbook? Not all of them do!

Good catch, since this is Windows 98 we're talking about, I believe WDM sound drivers are needed for redbook on a virtual drive.

So clonecd will make up to 4 files depending on the protection it finds, .cdd,.sub,.img, and .cue. If you want the copy to work you will need to leave it in that format and have mounting software that can support this format, ex: Daemon Tools. If you try to manually convert some of these files into another format you risk losing the ability to be recognized as a valid disc and whatever special formatting the .ccd file contains to the overall data. I dont know what would happen if you tried to rename the .img to .bin and keep the .cue file. Probably nothing good.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-02-02, 18:37:

DustyShinigami wrote on 2026-02-02, 18:02:

Okay, testing has shown that there's no music files for some reason. The game installs and plays perfectly fine, which is great. But for some reason there's no music. Hopefully it's just a matter of mounting the correct image this time and re-creating it with music tracks. I must have mounted the wrong one the first time. I'll mount it to the virtual drive and try playing it in a media player.

You said it uses redbook audio.

Does your virtual cd drive support CD:DA for redbook? Not all of them do!

Oh, the virtual drive in question is on my main PC. I'm using WinEmuCD Mounter. One thing I have found with my main system though, is that players are a bit of pain at recognising it and playing the image's music tracks. Both VLC and Media Player Classic can't seem to do it. Though 98's CD player can.

TheMLGladiator wrote on 2026-02-02, 18:46:

wierd_w wrote on 2026-02-02, 18:37:

You said it uses redbook audio.

Does your virtual cd drive support CD:DA for redbook? Not all of them do!

Good catch, since this is Windows 98 we're talking about, I believe WDM sound drivers are needed for redbook on a virtual drive.

Apparently not. Someone shared with me that VxD can do it if you connect the sound card to the CD drive with a S/PDIF cable. I've been able to play an image's redbook audio in-game and in the CD player. 😀

Shagittarius wrote on 2026-02-02, 18:57:

So clonecd will make up to 4 files depending on the protection it finds, .cdd,.sub,.img, and .cue. If you want the copy to work you will need to leave it in that format and have mounting software that can support this format, ex: Daemon Tools. If you try to manually convert some of these files into another format you risk losing the ability to be recognized as a valid disc and whatever special formatting the .ccd file contains to the overall data. I dont know what would happen if you tried to rename the .img to .bin and keep the .cue file. Probably nothing good.

I'll give it a try. I have backups of the files. Alcohol 120%'s virtual drive has mounted it, loaded the game, and is running it perfectly fine, with music. 😀

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-02-02, 18:36:

Alexraptor wrote on 2026-02-02, 18:18:

Some old game CD's are actually tricky to duplicate properly because they contain BOTH data and music layers, the later of which often isn't preseved when you rip them.

I.E. You can take the CD for Age of Empires II and insert it into any CD player, and the player will play the soundtrack, just like any other music disc.

That is what this thread is about. Music on a CD like this is referred to as "Redbook Audio" as the title of the thread says.

Also, they aren't on separate layers. The data usually occupies one track (which may take up most of the disc) while the audio tracks are separate, but they are all on the same layer. Adding redbook audio tracks (music) means there is less room for data, and vice versa.

I see, i haven't even heard of "redbook" until today, so my bad i guess.

Alexraptor wrote on 2026-02-02, 20:31:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-02-02, 18:36:

Alexraptor wrote on 2026-02-02, 18:18:

Some old game CD's are actually tricky to duplicate properly because they contain BOTH data and music layers, the later of which often isn't preseved when you rip them.

I.E. You can take the CD for Age of Empires II and insert it into any CD player, and the player will play the soundtrack, just like any other music disc.

That is what this thread is about. Music on a CD like this is referred to as "Redbook Audio" as the title of the thread says.

Also, they aren't on separate layers. The data usually occupies one track (which may take up most of the disc) while the audio tracks are separate, but they are all on the same layer. Adding redbook audio tracks (music) means there is less room for data, and vice versa.

I see, i haven't even heard of "redbook" until today, so my bad i guess.

No problem. 🙂

It isn't a term that has been used much in the past 25 years, but it is the name of the standard going back to the beginning.

Also, for once an AI overview actually provided a decently clear, and I believe correct, summary of how this works:

Games with CD audio, commonly known as mixed-mode CDs (containing both data and audio tracks), are generally considered a combin […]
Show full quote

Games with CD audio, commonly known as mixed-mode CDs (containing both data and audio tracks), are generally considered a combination of Red Book (CD Digital Audio) and Yellow Book (CD-ROM) standards. Specifically, the, game data resides in a Yellow Book track, while the audio tracks (redbook audio) follow the Red Book standard.

• Red Book Audio: Refers to the standard 16-bit 44.1kHz PCM audio tracks that can be played in a regular CD player.
• Yellow Book (CD-ROM): Defines the data tracks, which hold the executable game code and assets.
• Mixed Mode: Early CD-ROM games (e.g., Sega CD, early PlayStation) often used Track 1 for data (Yellow Book) and subsequent tracks for CD audio (Red Book).

Blue Book refers specifically to "Enhanced CD" or "CD Extra" (a type of mixed-mode disc where all audio tracks are followed by one data session), which is different from early mixed-mode CD-ROM games.

Since coming to these forums, and becoming a retro PC enthusiast, I hadn't heard of the term either. I've learnt loads since starting this hobby. 😀

Anyway, I tried renaming the .img file to .BIN, but unsurprisingly, it doesn't work. Likewise with trying to convert CDClone's files. But the output they do - cdd, .sub, .img, and .cue - work perfectly fine, which is the main thing. I'll have to do the same for The Longest Journey's first CD as that has copy protection, too. In fact, I only learnt the other day that these discs that have copy protection have a ring embedded into the surface, which I never knew.

TheMLGladiator wrote on 2026-02-02, 18:46:

Good catch, since this is Windows 98 we're talking about, I believe WDM sound drivers are needed for redbook on a virtual drive.

WDM is probably more successful but I am using VxD drivers with an SB Live and Alcohol 120% is able to pass through redbook audio

I think using the term redbook isn't even technically correct since it refers to the authoring of an entire audio disc like standard music CDs. It's really yellowbook audio which is the audio component of a mixed mode data+audio disc. But redbook is what people know.

DustyShinigami wrote on 2026-02-02, 20:41:

Anyway, I tried renaming the .ccd file to .BIN

NO! You're meant to mount that in DT or VCD.

leileilol wrote on 2026-02-02, 21:31:

DustyShinigami wrote on 2026-02-02, 20:41:

Anyway, I tried renaming the .ccd file to .BIN

NO! You're meant to mount that in DT or VCD.

Hm? Which one is VCD? I was only trying what Shagittarius mentioned about renaming IMG to BIN. Sorry, I made a mistake in saying I renamed .ccd. I meant .img.

.ccd is its own thing!

It is 'similar to' .cue/.bin, but not the same thing! .cue/.bin does not preserve subchannel data. .ccd does.

Renaming the image was a shower thought, you shouldn't do it unless there's a specific reason to. If a particular piece of software only supports bin/cue and iso format images, renaming a different format image won't work.