A QUICK AND DIRTY WAY TO MAKE COPIES OF ANY AUDIO DISC 1) Use CDCLIP.EXE to copy the entire audio disc into a file on your harddrive (Warning: this file could consume as much as 750Mb of disk space). 2) Use MAKECUE.EXE to generate a CUE SHEET file. This file will contain the information needed to build the table-of-contents on the new disc. NOTE: You must edit this file and add a FILE command to specify the name of the file that was created by CDCLIP. Refer to DAO.TXT to learn about cue sheets and the FILE command. 3) Use DAO.EXE to record your new disc using the files that were created in steps 1 and 2. The resulting CD will be exactly the same as the original except that any "pause areas" between tracks will not be explicitly encoded on the new disc (they will appear to be part of the tracks and not as a gaps between tracks). The only noticable difference will be in the time values displayed on your CD player. The actual amount of data on the disc and the contents of the data will be identical. ********************************************************************** Short lesson on tracks, indexes, and "pause areas"... The table-of-contents (TOC) on a CDROM only specifies where each track starts. It doesn't specify where each track ends. You may be thinking "A track obviously ends one block before the start of the next one". While this statement is true for some discs, it is usually not the case. Each track can have an optional "pause area" between itself and the previous track. Have you ever noticed that when you play some CDs, one song will end, and then the display on your CD player will count down -00:02 -00:01 -00:00, and then start the next song? This is the pause area between two tracks. It is usually two seconds long, but it can be more or less. The pause area usually contains "digital silence", but this isn't required. The starting time of any CD track is specified in minutes/seconds/frames. There are 75 frames per second and each frame contains 2352 bytes of audio data (75 * 2352 = 176400 bytes/second). A disc is divided up into tracks, and the tracks are divided up into smaller units called "indexes". There can be a maximum of 99 tracks per disc and 99 indexes per track. The table of contents contains pointers only to index 1 of each track. The other indexes must be scanned for by the CD player. NOTE: Most CD players don't support subindexes, which isn't a big deal since 99.99% of all CDs don't have them anyway. For each frame of data there is an additional 16 bytes of data (called Subcode-Q data) that describes what track/index the frame belongs to and the absolute/relative time of the frame. NOTE: Not all CDROM drives on the market are capable of reading Q data and returning it to a user's program. This is one of the reasons why it is difficult to produce an exact bit for bit copy of an audio disc. Let's say that an audio CD has the following table-of-contents... TRACK 1 - 00:02:00 TRACK 2 - 04:50:00 TRACK 3 - 07:30:15 TRACK 4 - 10:15:60 Track 1 always begins at 00:02:00 (or higher). The "pause area" of the first track is required and must be at least two seconds long. The pause area is encoded with an index equal to zero, while the main data area is encoded with an index equal to one. TRACK 1 INDEX 0 00:00:00 ! two second pause TRACK 1 INDEX 1 00:02:00 ! start of track 1 TRACK 2 INDEX 0 04:48:00 ! two second pause TRACK 2 INDEX 1 04:50:00 ! start of track 2 TRACK 3 INDEX 0 07:29:15 ! one second pause TRACK 3 INDEX 1 07:30:15 ! start of track 3 TRACK 4 INDEX 1 10:15:60 ! start of track 4 (no pause)