Recently, I needed to backup a Music CD with my Linux OS. Sadly, this was not simple. This post discusses using Linux to back up a music cd. Nothing more, nothing less. I don’t intend to promote or sell my backups. Yes, I am aware that
- On Mac and Windows, music cd backup woes aren’t worth discussing since easily-obtainable programs exist
- This is an area of computer use that can raise eyebrows
Why backup our music CDs?
Safekeeping in a familiar location; your personal computer
If I backed up my Led Zeppelin CD “In Through the Out Door”, then I wouldn’t be upset about it (it’s missing). Of course, music CDs are not as expensive as they were before the days of digital purchase, digital download, and youtube, but it’s the principal of it.
Easily encode & transfer music for different formats & players
For example, you make a digital backup of “In Through the Out Door”. Your wife wants to listen to it on her iPad in high quality audio format. Your nephew would also like to listen to it, but has limited audio file type support and less storage space on his iPod Touch. With a full digital backup of the cd, you can easily encode the songs to satisfy both requirements without having to take the original music cd out of its case multiple times.
You covered “why”, ? “how”
I will first give citation to the source of the solution that worked for me. See the first post from user noz in How to dump an Audio CD to ISO from the freebsd forums for the instructions. I found a “gotcha” (possibly) overlooked in the “Playing it” section; Note: Playing the BIN without conversion will give you an earful of static. This is notable, it also applies to the burn process. You want to burn the converted (not original) bin file. I got this wrong the first time. To avoid the mistake the 2nd time, I did the following:
- Kept the file names the same for both original and converted bin files.
- Used sed to replace the source (in TOC) to the converted bin file. Sed was quicker than a GUI text editor to accomplish same [find/replace] task.
For example, if your original bin = in-out-door.bin, converted bin = in-out-door-converted.bin, and TOC file is in-out-door.toc
sed -i -e ‘s/in-out-door.bin/in-out-door-converted.bin/’ in-out-door.toc
You might prefer to rename the .bin files and leave the toc as-is. It’s up to you.