The reason I ask this is that for the past 24 hours I've been reading everything about burning bin/cue files to cd-r (including How To's and Step by Step tutorials). There are answers for almost every questions I found related to my problem. The thing is that they all have to do with games or movies. If you have guess that I'm a newbie at this you are right ! The problem : I've got a Sample cd (drum beats, fx, etc / Akai format) and after unraring every .rar files I got a .bin and a .cue file (which seem fine). The thing is that I don't know how this should be used after the burning process. Does it become a perfect copy of the one found in stores ? Why should I make an Image ? Is an image a copy of an original cd ? or does it have another purpose ? Would changing the .bin file to .iso would make it easier ? I use CdrWin and/or Nero. Thank you very much in advance !!
BIN/CUE is one way to extract the whole layout of a CD (including boot sector, specifications, protection - sometimes - and so on). You can burn BIN/CUE of unprotected CDs with any software (look in the 'newbie guide') but you need specific software to backup ('extract' first and then 'burn' ) protected CDs. All this applies to PC CDs, PSX CDs, PS2 CDs, VCD, Audio CD and so on (but does NOT apply to DVD which is a completely different standard). The only difference is that PSX CD-ROM sucks, so you must burn at low speed, and that VCD/Audio CDs have no error correction, so again you must burn at low speed. A burned BIN/CUE is 'almost' a perfect copy of a CD. 'almost' because there are physical info (such as ATIP) that cause difference betweet original pressed CDs and burned CD-R. Conversion (from BIN to ISO) are useless and sometime spoils the image, so don't do it. Just use Alcohol 120%, which supports all image formats. I hope this review is enough... bye
