/display/SPR/Audio CD Preservation taken on 2019-12-25.
The original wiki at wiki.opf-labs.org is being decommissioned.
Audio CD Preservation
Title
Audio CD Preservation
Detailed description
A large collection of, predominantly audio, CDs needs preserving. The CD's initially need stabilising onto magnetic storage medium to prevent preservation issues relating to disc-rot. The content of these disc images then needs to be extracted and catalogued. The following discusses a number of tools to tackle the first part - disc stabilisation.
Imaging Tools
The following two tools provided the ability to create a disc image (.bin/.iso with .cue track listings file) of an audio CD with mechanisms to extract tracks to WAV files.
cdrdao (Linux)
One solution on Linux/Ubuntu was to read a binary from the CD using cdrdao
using the following command from the mounted cdrom device (here /dev/cdrom):
In order to verify if it is possible to extract wav files from the binary file, the table of contents (source.toc) was first converted to a cue file using toc2cue (included in the cdrdao package):
and the cue file was then used together with the binary file to extract wav files using bchunk:
ISOBuster (Windows)
- GUI based tool (although I believe it can be used as a command line tool also)
- Successfully creates .iso/.cue combination of audio CD
- ISOBuster can open the .cue file, display track listing and extract .wav files for each audio tracks
- Commercial product
- There are 3 versions with different levels of functionality (free; personal - US$40 and professional - US$60)
- http://www.isobuster.com/license-models.php
- From what I can gather from the above link, the free version can be used anywhere, even for commercial purposes.
.cue file - metadata
ISOBuster generates a .iso/.cue file pair as a audio CD disc image. Here is the contents of the .cue file generated for a 4-track audio CD (note there is no descriptive metadata about the tracks or the disc itself):
Other Imaging Tools
Other tools that were considered and/or tested
OSFClone
- http://www.osforensics.com/tools/create-disk-images.html
- Installed self-booting image onto USB drive
- Rebooted laptop and booted from USB drive
- OSFClone tool cannot "see" CD drive (on laptop)
- It could see USB drives and hard drives, just not the CD drive
- Could try a USB CD drive?
aimage (Ubuntu linux - live disk via bootable USB)
- http://packages.debian.org/unstable/afflib-tools
- Install via afflib-tools package (sudo apt-get)
- Tool can create AFF files
- Used this tool to create an AFF image from a Data CD; the image is mountable (and accessible) via OSFMount
- No successful creation of an audio CD AFF image
- I suspect the linux device (/dev/loop) I thought was the CD device was actually pointing to something else
guymager
- http://guymager.sourceforge.net/
- Installed on a Ubuntu live disk via bootable USB
- Creates AFF, EWF and DD image files
- A scan of drives would show the CD drive, however when trying to capture an image, the tool reports errors (bad sectors, I think).
bitcurator
- http://www.bitcurator.net/
- Tool not tried
- Mentions guymager, hence testing of that tool
Virtual Box Issues
Whilst it is possible to use the laptop's CD drive with a data CD in a Linux VM image (Ubuntu 12.04), it seems that VirtualBox cannot "passthrough" audio CD's from the host CD drive to the VM guest. This essentially prevents any use/testing of linux disk imaging tools via a VM image using VirtualBox (for audio CDs).
Solution Champion
Carl Wilson / 
Peter May / Sven Schlarb
Corresponding Issue(s)
A list of hyperlinks to the Issues to which this provides a Solution.
At risk and decaying audio data on CDs
Tool/code link
A link to code on Git hub or a corresponding myExperiment if applicable
Tool Registry Link
Add an entry to the OPF Tool Registry, and provide a link to it here.
Evaluation
Any notes or links on how the solution performed.