Hi all, Id like to know the best & accurate way to create a backup of original Audio CDs.
Is it by Copying On-the-Fly, or copying to hard disk as WAV and converted back?

Thanks!

Before someone else jumps on you back saying **USE THE SEARCH** I'll briefly give you the answer:

1. Use ExactAudioCopy (EAC)
2. Push the "Image" button - this extracts the entire cd as a wav file, with an associated .cue sheet with all the track information.
3. Burn the image to a blank cd - use Nero to "burn image" and select the .cue sheet to burn (or you could use burnatonce, which is better and free)

.dd.

PS. All the answers are somewhere in the forum. You just have to spend a bit of time reading a few threads to find them. And do learn to use the forum search function.

dub_doctor, thank you for providing a short and accurate answer.

J_C_Denton1, CDR age faster than pressed CDs (see the FAQ), thus in order to preserve your audio from aging, CDR is not a good solution. In fact, I think that an original CD is one of the most reliable medium regarding aging.

Of course, in order to preserve your originals from scratches, you should play the copies and store the original in a safe place, instead of the opposite.

To increase CD-R security this can be done:

1. Create backups as lossless compressed file + cue sheet and fill the saved space with PAR2 recovery files. Later, if the CD has already started to die - even if sectors are completely unrecoverable - data CD error recovery software like CDDataRescue will be able to copy all files from CD to HDD, some of them with errors. PAR2 recovery can now restore the original files (unless damage is already too big).

2. If playback on CD players is needed:
Create a "CD extra" CD-R (audio track + data track). Fill the data track with PAR2 error recovery files created from .wav + .cue used. To avoid the need of manual offest correction on recovery later, combined read/write offset should be used for extraction unless a burning software capable of offset correction is used. (I don't know of any that can burn CD extra with corrected offsets.)

This increases the lifespan of CDRs a bit. But say that you've got 50 backups, and that you check one every week, a given CDR will be checked once a year.
Even if the previous check showed no C2 error, it is not certain that one year later, something can still be recovered.
A more realistic scenario is that you'll never check them, because you never take the time to pass the 50 CDRs in CDSpeed.



Burn the audio session with EAC, and the dta session with Nero (if EAC closed the audio one properly, what is not sure).