How does one make a bit-perfect CD rip in 2022?

If we're talking about making an accurate rip of an audio CD, I'd recommend Exact Audio Copy with the error correction options enabled. I think it's Windows only though if that matters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exact_Audio_Copy

If you don't want to do it yourself, email donations@archive.org to explain why you're sending media and to coordinate logistics. You'd mail the discs to the Internet Archive's physical address [1] in San Francisco, ideally with the Internet Archive item identifier (https://archive.org/details/{$ID}) associated with each disc noted on the disc (post it note or similar, not an adhesive label). Should cost only a few bucks to send it USPS. They will preserve the donated media in their physical archive located offsite.

[1] https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...

First of all, kudos for the offer! I can understand the incomplete rip, since IIRC once a computer would see a data session, it would ignore anything else (like audio tracks).

I don't know for certain, but I think you would want to find software that can generate BIN/CUE files. You would end up with a single CUE file listing the multiple tracks of the disc (data, audio, etc.), and a set of BIN files.

Maybe https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=56493 would have the answer? If not, the Internet Archive has their own forums at https://archive.org/iathreads/forums.php

Best of luck!

I've gone down this rabbit hole for audio CDs a few months ago.

In addition to Exact Audio Copy (Windows only, proprietary) I was able to find some open source tools that should (haven't compared to EAC directly yet) achieve the same result.

One of the still maintained tools is [whipper](https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper). I've used it to successfully rip a few CDs, though in my case that wasn't really a challenge due to the good condition the CDs were in.

Ripping CUE/BIN with a tool like the now-venerable Brasero(found in every Linux distro) is basically the correct option, with the caveat being that it doesn't result in an easily mounted image for use in emulators etc.

To make the CD audio playable requires a second emulation step to read a CUE/BIN as if it were actually a CD-ROM and not a random-access byte buffer, and when I went looking recently, that precise use-case isn't well-supported, because it becomes a thicket of driver interfaces - instead burning a new CD is still the simplest way to get the result.

However you can still extract an ISO from the first track and play the result without the audio, as with the rips you've already discovered.

Not sure about "bit-perfect" but I use abcde to rip CDs. I tend to set it up with a bash script to start ripped when I insert a CD. Should say it's a Linux program, not sure if it's available on windows.

Use a twenty year old computer with an plextor ultraplex drive and cdparanoia. :(

I can't believe it took me this long to find someone else asking this question in the exact same way I ask myself some time ago.

I always thought that CUE/BIN files were the way to do this, but I don't understand the history behind the format beyond their origins or how one uses existing utilities today to produce them. In fact, I don't think there are any that aren't proprietary, like the ones you've mentioned.

I suspect this question does actually have a simple answer, but I've scrubbed Unix utilities, file format documentation and history surrounding optical image copies, and found nothing meaningful outside of the information you'd read off Wikipedia.[1][2][3][4][5]

As far as I can tell, all modern bit-for-bit optical image file representations are based on proprietary formats that occasionally have Unix-like tools associated with them. And usually only to convert said proprietary formats to lossy(!) standardized ones. Lame.

Anyway, hope this helps, thot_experiment.

Edit: Oh wait, one last thought: based on my reading from some time ago, and from what I understand today, the state of the art never really progressed past CUE/BIN files. I think this is primarily because despite alternative formats in this space, CUE/BIN had been more prolific than any of the others, so that's what people continued to use.

> When used for disc images, the format is usually called CUE/BIN, indicating that it stores a disc image composed of one cue sheet file and one or more .bin files. The .bin files are raw sector-by-sector binary copies of tracks in the original discs. These binary .bin files usually contain all 2,352 bytes from each sector in an optical disc, including control headers and error correction data in the case of CD-ROMs (unlike ISO images of CD-ROMs, which store only the user data). However, the TRACK command in a cue sheet file can be used to refer to binary disc images that contain only the user data of each sector, by indicating the specific CD mode of the tracks from which the image was created (which is necessary to know the size of the user data in each sector).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_sheet_(computing)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDRWIN

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRG_(file_format)

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Descriptor_File

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CloneCD_Control_File