This application is freeware: you may freely use and distribute it non-commercially as long as this readme file accompanies it. The author retains copyright.
Audio CD Mover is a "fat binary" that runs native on both PowerPC and 68K Macs. Yeah, I know it's big for something so simple, but it's a little piece of code living in a big framework that allowed me to do it in a day.
A sample CD database is provided so you can test the program. (I recommend all discs in the database. :)
What's New Since 1.0
- I wrote 1.0 by reverse engineering the CD database format. Now I know the actual format, and there are a couple of things I should handle differently.
- Fixed a bug when merging files where identical resource IDs were used for different CDs.
- If a resource is missing from a file when opened, that CD is skipped rather than refusing to open the file.
- I tweaked the document icon. If you care and you had 1.0, rebuild your desktop.
About Audio CD Mover
If you use your CD-ROM drive to play audio CDs, you probably know that the AppleCD Audio Player (on the Apple menu) allows you to enter the disc and song titles of your CDs. Whenever you pop in a known disc, that disc's titles appear in the player window. It's somewhat tedious to type in all those titles, and there's no way to merge your titles with someone else's, but it's a nice feature to have.
This application, Audio CD Mover, lets you manipulate the database document that the AppleCD Audio Player uses to store the titles. You can merge several documents together, you can look at the contents of document, and you can remove disc entries from document. The main benefit to this is that you can merge other people's CD databases (or ones from several of your machines) into yours, and accumulate a larger one.
How To Use Audio CD Mover
To open a database document, just select Open from the File menu. The file will appear in a document window. Each disc's title is shown, with an expander triangle to the left. If you click the expander triangle, the song titles of that disc are shown.
The document used by the AppleCD Audio Player is called "CD Remote Programs" and is kept in the Preferences folder of the System Folder. Audio CD Mover can open it. If you want the AppleCD Audio Player to use a new document that you've created or obtained, just make sure it's named correctly and is placed in the Preferences folder before opening the player.
If you have more than one document open, the Merge Open Files command on the File menu will be enabled. Selecting this command creates a new, untitled, unsaved document containing the merged data from all the open documents. If there is duplicate disc information in the open documents, just one version of that information is placed into the new document. You can name the document whatever you want when you save it.
You can select disc entries in the document window by clicking on them; the shift and command keys will extend the selection. The Select All command on the Edit menu also works. The selected disc entries can be removed from the document by selecting Clear from the Edit menu, or by pressing the delete or clear keys. When you save the document, the deleted disc entries will be gone.
You can use the Save As command on the File menu to save the document with a new name.
Trivia: How CDs Are Identified
Part of the standard audio CD format is a place for a unique product identifier. But think about it: who is responsible for assigning these unique IDs to everyone who presses a disk? (Anyone can buy a CD burner for $1500 now and start cranking 'em out!) Answer: no one. The identifier is essentially useless. So, any application that keeps track of CDs must use a different method of differentiating them. The AppleCD Audio Player checks the number of 1/75 second audio data blocks on the disk, and uses that count as a unique identifier; it's unlikely that any two products will have the exact same amount of total audio data, within 1/75 second.
