Ripping off recordings DIGITAL AUDIO EXTRACTION DO'S, DON'TS AND DO'ERS - Statistical Data Included

Emedia Professional, July, 1999 by Robert A. Starrett

Once the driver is installed, Compact Disc Audio files (.cda), appear as WAVs and can be opened directly from the CD in a wave editor and otherwise treated as WAV files. Opening the file in a WAV editor and then saving it to hard disk gives you the same result as extracting the track from the disc. You can also use any WAV-to-MP3 converter to convert the cda file directly from the audio CD to MP3 (or other compressed format) without having first to extract it to hard disk. This driver will work with some drives, but not others.

When you open a CD after this replacement driver is installed, you will see two subdirectories on the disc in addition to the audio tracks. These subdirectories are Mono and Stereo. Under each subdirectory, you will see three additional subdirectories: 11.025KHz, 22.050KHz, and 44.100KHz. Opening these directories reveals the WAV files with the usual Windows WAV icons. Right click on one of the WAVs and choose Properties. If the file properties box shows the preview tab, then the drive is supported by this driver, if only the general tab is showing, then the drive is not capable of working with the new driver.

You can get the driver from http://www.maz-sound. com/cd-rippers.html. To install the driver, go to the windows\ system\iosubsys directory and rename CDFS.VXD to something else. Then unzip the file and copy the new cdfs.vxd into the directory.

Robert A. Starrett (bobs@cdpage.com) is a contributing editor for EMedia Professional, co-columnist for THE CD WRITER, and an independent consultant based in Denver, Colorado. He is the co-author of CD-ROM Professional's CD-Recordable Handbook.

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