QUERY: editing CloneCD images & best for game data & music CDs

[andwan0]

This is really a question about making a backup copy of a game CD which contains both data & analogue music. The game in question is an old 1997 game called Total Annihilation - don't worry, the company Cavedog liquidated. Due to CD usage and how old the CD is, I want to preserve it by not using it and making an exact copy as CD images.

Many other discussions/posts talk about either ripping analogue music, or making backup copies of data CDs. But I haven't come across topics which concentrate on a CD containing data & analogue music.

I have used CloneCD to backup my game CD. Some of the music tracks came out with noise or too much gain. One data file came out corrupted. While CloneCD is good for game data, it wasn't so good with the music.

Two questions:

• What is the best program to backup game CDs with analogue music (making best exact copy of the analogue music too)?
  
  Is there a way to change one of the files of a CloneCD image?

[DABhand]

Bear in mind the media itself may well be protected also.

So when making an image, try Alcohol 120% and read the disc at the slowest speed possible, yes it takes longer but you have more chance of a close to perfect 1to1 copy.

If no protection, then goto www.goldenhawk.com CDRwin is more than capable of making and burning multi discs. It also supports Karaoke media also (on some drives)

[andwan0]

Yes, Total Annihilation is a mix-moded CD (track 1 is data, other tracks for analogue audio). I just realised that Total Annihilation doesn't even have copy protection (from GCW)... so I didn't really need to use copy-protection profiles from CloneCD at all. I think the last time I made CloneCD images was in 2003 on a crappy CD-ROM drive.

TIP4SELF: use a good clean CD/DVD drive when making images.. & use a normal or playstation CD profile (as long as it extracts sub-channel and doesn't ignore bad sectors or errors).

Well, my old game CDs were probably naff... so I bought another new pair off eBay and they look virtually clean and new. Now am experiementaly with different CD imaging programs to see which one is best... I'll probably write up a comparison or report my findings onto their respective wikipedia pages...

1. Alcohol 120% has "Data Position Measurement"... is this good or bad? What is it really?
2. Luckily Daemon Tools Adv. has a Mixed Mode Profile. Though am confused by the subchannel options (96bytes of raw PW? or 16 bytes of PQ?). It can compress MDS/MDF format which is also good.
3. Going to try CloneCD, GameJackel, PowerISO, BlindWrite, CDRWIN, MagicISO, UltraISO, Nero, etc...

TIP4SELF: How to make flawless mix-mode images? Am not too worried about the DATA section since I can use RapidCRC and verify checksums. The hard bits are the analogue audio tracks. I did a bit of reading about Exact Audio Copy or 1-to-1 copy of analogue audio tracks. There's a program called paranoia(?). So I can do the Exact-Audio-Copy off the CD first... then do the EAC off the images and compare the 2 copies to see if they match.