Rip an audio CD 1:1

Question

Is there a way to rip an audio CD to an ISO9660 file? I've tried simple things like dd in the past and it hasn't worked. I'd like to essentially have a mirror image of exactly what's on the disk, not even necessarily a folder of WAV files.

I do understand that I could rip the CD to WAV files or even FLAC files, but is there a way to just duplicate the disc to one file, so I could extract WAVs or FLACs from it later on? The idea is to be able to make a virtually identical copy of the source media.

Answer 1

An audio CD doesn't contain a filesystem at all. The format is defined as a particular stream of bits directly representing sounds. This is unlike DVDs, where a video DVD is a DVD with a UDF filesystem with a particular structure.

The classical CD burning suite, cdrecord, includes cdda2wav to rip an audio CD to a WAV file, and cdrecord -audio to burn a WAV file to an audio CD. Another tool for CD ripping is cdparanoia; it tries very hard to be as faithful as possible to the audio data. Many CD burning GUIs have a button or menu entry to rip, burn or copy audio CDs.

Answer 2

If you want an image file of an audio CD, you can use readcd/readom in TOC mode. It will output a .toc and a .bin files that you can use to burn identical copies in other optical media. The .toc file can be converted to .cue format with toc2cue and obtain a .cue file that is compatible with software available for other operating systems (and can be read by applications like cdrecord/wodim, braseo and k3b).