[game_preservation] Archivist's Burden

[Mike Melanson]

Andrew Armstrong wrote:

> Looking up the dd command it looks pretty simple to get an ISO of a 

> complete CD and it seems to be able to log enough information - 

> especially useful for those glaringly obvious read problems some CDs 

> have (from being poor quality to scratches to mess on them - so the 

> noerror might even want to be omitted so you can check out any read 

> errors so the ISO isn't broken).

> 

> One thing on the error sections, it doesn't seem to have a "repeatedly 

> try reading data" option - odd, but I presume it does try more then once.


I've used the 'dd' command on many occasions for this task and it works 
well. It's not particularly low level. It just reads from the device 
file, treating it as a regular file, and if there is anything wrong, 
that's handled at the OS driver level. I have, in fact, gotten faulty 
ISOs using 'dd' from heavily scratched discs.


> The only site I know that has ISO's (or CD contents more accurately) is 

> Textfiles, Jason Scott might have an automated solution he's willing to 

> share, might be worth asking.


This script should take less than 10 minutes to write and debug. I just 
wanted to make sure I'm on the right track and that I have the 
technologies covered. I once wrote another Python script that does a 
similar thing with creating ISO/MP3 rips of Sega CDs that are suitable 
for emulator play:

http://multimedia.cx/eggs/sega-cd-ripper/


> Oh, for audio too, yeah, FLAC would be the preferable one in my opinion 

> next to the raw files themselves if you want to save space. FLAC is 

> open, so it's a pretty good one for standards for getting to read it 

> back later, lots of tools that read and write them.


FLAC is nice for those reasons. However, the open source FFmpeg program 
is also able to read and write Apple Lossless directly and most lossless 
audio compressors perform more or less equally. Encoding to ALAC has the 
benefit of being able to play directly in iTunes.

Maybe I'll just encode to both formats. Lossless compressors generally 
share the property of being blindingly fast to encode.

Thanks...

-- 
     -Mike Melanson