The CD-Rchive Handbook : Extracting Audio from CD

Contents

## Extracting Audio from CD

General:-
First of all, you need to be aware that cdda2wav requires a CDROM capable of digital extraction from CDDA.
Using CD-Rchive this can be native SCSI or ATAPI IDE via OpenBSD's atapiscsi driver.
If you can use CD-Rchive at all, you have a CD Writer which can be addressed as a SCSI device. CD Writers are generally of a far higher build quality than CDROMs and compliant to all the existing standards at time of manufacture.
Unless you have a very old or quirky CD Writer, it will be capable of digital audio extraction and most likely at a higher speed than your CDROM. My writer will extract at 8x and a new Yamaha writer released late 2000 boasts 40x extraction!
If you use a 2 stage process, we can just use the same device for both extraction and writing.
Alternately you can specify a CD-ROM as the source device and your CD Writer as the Target device.

Information:-
First go to the Target tab page. If not already set, select a CD device from the drop down combo-box entitled Select Target......
Switch to the CDDA tab page and you should find this choice mirrored under Target Device = .
Now go to the Source tab page. If not already set, select a CD device from the drop down combo-box entitled Select Source......
If you only have or only wish to use your CD Writer, select this device again.
Switch to the CDDA tab page and you should find this choice mirrored under Source Device = .
With a music CD in your Source device, go to the .wav tab page, ensure the General CD Info radio button is checked and click the [Fetch Info] button.
You will be switched to the Ops tab page and the help browser pane overlaid with an output log viewer.
In this viewer you will see the version information for cdda2wav, then information about the number of tracks, their length, index numbers etc.
To calculate the size of a .wav file from the length of a track, just add a zero to the number of whole minutes. This will be the approximate size in MB.
Restore the help browser by clicking the [Home] button
Other information available under the same radio button group on the .wav tab page is self explanatory.
Be aware however that cdda2wav samples track 1 of the CD to get this other information and dumps the track to file in the current directory.
There will be files called audio.wav and audio.inf in the current directory which need deleting.
This is also a very good reason for always specifying a common name element for all .wav files lifted from CDDA tracks, rather than using the default.
Otherwise when you fetch information about the next music CD you wish to extract from, it could overwrite the track you have just recorded!

Extracting Audio:-
Return to the .wav tab page.
In the Mode button group select the Default radio button.
Unless you are doing something special, you will want the settings this gives:-
Stereo
CD Quality
Individual files for each track
16 bit sampling
CDROM extraction speed 0
Start at track 1
Use buffers
(default 16 but reduce if memory limited - try 4)

NB
Individual files for each track is the sanest way to extract multiple tracks from CDDA.
You will need to specify a common path/name element for the track files.
CD-Rchive will feed this to cdda2wav, resulting in tracks extracted to files named /path/common_name_element_01.wav /path/common_name_element_02.wav etc.
This same common name element is used by CD-Rchive to pass filenames to cdrecord. cdda2wav was written to be compatible with cdrecord.
CDROM speed 0 equates to default speed on most drives. You can experiment with other settings, some modern CD Writers support extraction rates of 8x and above.
Start at Track 1 will record all tracks on the CD commencing at the first track. This is the most common usage.
Alternately you could specify a start track other than 1 and an end track, to record a section of the CD.
Note that if you specify the same start and end track, cdda2wav will record each track starting with the start index and ignoring the end index.
Expectation would be that this would record a single track.
This is a bug with cdda2wav (or is it a feature!?)
To use start/end index to record a single track, you need to specify Start=1 & End=2 and discard track 2 or similar tactic.

Once you have chosen your settings, ensure the music CD is in your Source device and switch to the Ops tab page
Click on the [CDAudio to .wav] button.
You will be given a last chance to cancel the operation.
Click on the [CDAudio to .wav] button again
The help browser window will be overlaid with one showing the output from cdda2wav.
When the operation is complete a click on [Home] will restore the help browser.
General:-
If you find that you need to abort the operation, click [Cancel Operation].
Please note that it does not guarantee a clean end to the operation. It kills the child process running the operation and attempts to reset the SCSI bus. Aborting during a write operation is liable to leave the CDR inaccesable and of use only as a coaster!
Writing Audio CDs