Hi.

I want to rip the CD "Songs in the key of X" wich doesn't conform to the Philips "Red Book". There's a track before the first one, I have to play the first track and push rewind button on my CD player to go to the start of this song and to listen to it. I tried with EAC and CDex but they only want to extract the songs from 1 to 15 and not the one which is before 1.

How can I rip the song which is before the first track ?

EAC can actually do this, but it depends on the capabilities of your drive. What you have to do is tell EAC to detect the pre-gaps (make sure all that is setup correctly for your drive, check here: http://www.ping.be/satcp/eacoffsets01.htm#-). After this you can tell EAC to "Append Gaps to Next Track" (Action Menu) and rip track 1, with the audio before song 1 being appended to the first track, which you can then split with a .wav file editor or something. Your other option, which is probably an easier solution, is to select "Copy Range" and specify the area before the track. This should do what you are wanting... I have a couple of cd's with audio before track 1, in the pre-gap, and it works great.

Thanks very much. I will try this tomorrow and give a feedback.

More info, especially for hidden tracks beginning in a negative absolute adress, therefore missing their first second when extracted by range or index-based : http://www.digital-inn.de/showthread.php?threadid=11419

I've tested with two CD-ROM drives (Actima A40T and Samsung SC-152L). EAC extract the track with the gap in a wave file of approximatly 130mb with a duration of 12'37 but there's no sound except track 1 at the end of the file. I've also tried with a Yamaha CDRW4416E but I couldn't do anything, the system freeze.

No luck. It seems those two drives can't read the pregap.
Did you try in burst mode ? Enable overread ?