I've purchased quite a few audio and software CDs over the years, and am starting to worry about that wear and tear sooner or later will damage the collection and make the CDs unreadable.

Instead of burning backup CD copies of the media, I'm considering buying a huge external hard drive, which I would like to store the CD images on.

I'm not interested in ripping the audio CDs to mp3 and so on, the aim is to be able to replace a damage CD with an identical copy.

My humble question is whether there is any software that does the job.

As Nero, has its own format to save image files (working for both audio and data CDs), I've been considering that. However, as I mainly use linux distributions such as Debian and SuSE, a non-MSwindows solution would be my preference.

I've made a few search attempts trying to find a thread handling this issue - I'm probably not the first one to have it. However, I didn't end up with anything relevant...

I'm grateful for any hints, help on this!

Wish You a Great and Happy New Year!

Here's a link to some of the command line utilities for making ISO's

http://www.cpqlinux.com/cdrw.html

FYI, not positive, but I'm pretty sure that you can simply change the extension of a Nero iso from .nrg to .iso....

You can use k3b and save your CDs as ISO images which is a free format (I think).
k3b is an application that can do a lot of things with CDs and DVDs (this includes burning audio/data cds or creating images of them)

Thanks for the quick and kind replies!

Are You sure that I can use "dd if=/dev/cdrom of=image.iso" also for audio CDs? Somewhere I think I've read that the .iso format handles data CDs, but not audio dittos. I'd be happy if that's wrong!

Not sure if using dd will do audio or not, in particular, CD's with copy protection schemes may present a problem... simple enough to test tho...

You can also use the mkisofs command, which is most likely included with burning tools such as K3B(like LazyP suggested trying)or the cdrdao utility


Here's another link to try, although some of the utilities may be depreciated or located elsewhere such as sourceforge..

http://www.etree.org/linux.html

CD-DA or Redbook Audio (audio CD) is not the same as iso9660

you would be better off ripping your audio CD's to WAV files on your HD then using a program like K3B to write them back to a CD as an Audio disk which would again create a CD-DA or Redbook Audio CD that will work in your home stereo.

and yes I said WAV not MP3 for a reason..

Audio should be ripped at 44.1KHz 16 bits for zero loss, anything else or the introduction of compression (MP3 or ogg vorbis for example ) will degrade the audio signal.

http://home.twcny.rr.com/prowak/CDRWTech.html

enjoy !!