I would like the internet community to test this procedure I have stumbled apon for making digital copies (for back purposes only) of damaged/corrupted CD’s with CDS (Catus Datashield). The reason I needed to do this was to allow me to play the CD I purchased on a Harddisk Jukebox which was unable to even read the discS protected by CDS as well as to allow me to play them on my IPAQ mp3 player. I have been able to perform a backup of the CD “Robbie Williams – Escapology” which ClonyXXLv2.0.1.4c detected the protection as Cactus 200.0.4- 3.0 Build 12b I have also been able to perform a backup of the CD “Atomic Kitten – Feels So Good” which ClonyXXLv2.0.1.4c detected the protection as Cactus Cactus 200.0.4- 4.0 build 10b Since I have no other corrupt cd’s to test this procedure on, I thought that maybe someone on the internet community be able to help me out by testing this with there corrupt CD’s. There are several pieces of software involved in this process so I will list the complete procedure and version numbers of the software I have succeeded with. Using my Sony CD Writer (CRX140) nothing special with the hardware at all (even a very old firmware) note that the protected disc functions how it is supposed to ie can only see the crappy data portion of the cd. Insert the disk Using blindread/blindwrite version 4.3.1.32 from http://www.blindwrite.com dump the corrupted CD to a folder onto the harddisk Using the Blindwrite (BWT,BWI,BWS) output format Using the Extraction method Nibble Next using Daemon tools version 3.29 from http://www.daemon-tools.com/ mount the Dumped image file created in step 2 to a virtual drive letter At this point you should have a 1:1 copy of the CD which you can access without the disc (unfortunately the virtual CD still contains the Protecion ) also on this virtual CD you can only play the poor quality downgraded files on your pc using their even lower quality player….. Now using your favourite software to extract WAV’s/mp3/mp3pro from CD’s like Nero v5.5.64 http://www.nero.com or EAC Using save track from generic stealth (virtual device for Daemon mounted CD) Select the track(s) that you want to obtain a digital copy of and the output format (wav) for full audio cd or mp3/mp3pro for the trusty mp3 player. Now using your favourite CD burning software write an Audio CD using the extracted WAV’s or play the high quality versions of the files using the player of your choosing. Hope this procedure works for other CD’s also. Good luck.
Nice post. Sorry I don't own any CD useful to test it. Should I post this to Audio forum as well? It would be nice to test the method on many CD Units and create a 'Drive table' as the guy in CDFreaks did: http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/99/10 If someone is able to do this job we might post it in the 'Articles' section.
Cactus Data Shield usually has artificially made errors on the disc and ripping it with BlindWrite quite possibly can result in slight skips & glitches in the sound.
Yes I too found that if I used blindread to dump the image and then wrote that image of the ripped file using blindwrite there was a slight audio noise and sometimes skips did occur. However not a single glith when I did it this way....Since I am NOT not using blindwrite to write a 1:1 copy of the disc but instead extracting the Audio Tracks with something like Exact Audio Copy which wouldn't work properly with the screwed up physical disc entries but for some reason now on the virtual daemon/blindread copy of the disk it all works perfectly at least for the 2 cds I have. Try for yourselves I would like to see hits and misses listing album names with this technique so I know to avoid buying those CD's.
Did you try(and test) the method reading sub-q? This would be the more "appropriate" way to extract an audio image. Shoey
I think the Virtual Drive trick works well because VXD reads 200x, with better performance respect to physical CD-ROM Units. Do you agree?
Shoey, since my poor old Sony CDRW drive is nothing special (infact poor) I experiemented with the various options Eg. Alternative read method (UN supported) and yes Extract subcodes (Reads subs Pw) on Blindread.
You might find this useful: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index....cd,and,eac&s=3a06bfa3c954ab48d17237d8a995a799 http://www.digital-inn.de/showthread.php?s=cfb48c678e3d316c6288ed48c054ecf0&threadid=19545 (In this thread I summarized the CDS 200 workaround I use. You'll find lots of detailed information if you do searches e.g. for CDS on the mentioned forums.) Additionally two things worth to mention here IMO: 1. The reason why many drives only "see" the data track is the manipulated TOC of CDS 200 protected CDs. EAC's "Detect TOC Manually" or the Marker/Post-It trick circumvent this with most drives. 2. The way programs like Blindread or CloneCD read audio is identical to EAC's burst mode - so there's no error detection/correction (-> Scratches, Fingerprints ...). The errors caused intentionally by CDS 200 don't need to be "corrected" in a way as EAC does because the drive will return identical results on each re-read. (If you use C2 in EAC don't use it for extracting CDS 200 protected CDs - it slows down extraction dramatically.)
