Need help with computer not reading audio CDs

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srellim234
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Someone just gave me an old stack of 100 homemade audio CDs. They contain both spoken and musical tracks. I have no idea what file format or program they were written with. I do know that most tracks are analog to digital conversions from vinyl and tape. Many have multiple artists on them.They play on the CD player in the car but both computers (Windows 7 on one, Windows 10 on the other) see them as empty discs ready to write files to. iTunes, Media Player and JRiver Media Jukebox all see them as empty CDs. My guess is that they are a strange file format the computer doesn't recognize but then why would the car stereo see them?

The spoken ones need to be divided among a couple of families and the gentleman who gave them to me asked if I could help separate the music ones by artist and possibly identify tracks for him. He was given these by his son who is no longer available.

I prefer getting these to open on the computer; I don't really want to have to load them by hooking up a separate CD player and then recording them as they play.

Anyone recognize this problem and have a relatively easy solution?


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Rogue One
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Did you try opening them on a non windows based computer? Give them someone with a Macbook, I'll bet that's how they were formatted.

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szh
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A complete SWAG: these may not be traditional Audio CDs? I.e., not in the standard Redbook format.

Perhaps they just need to be mounted as regular file system drives so that you can look at them as folders containing "files" ...

Even if done on a Mac, they should still be readable on a PC as files in a folder (along with the other meta files that are Mac-specific information inre the files).

They probably do not have extensions in the sense that the PC can recognize them as audio files, because that information from a Mac is in the meta files.

So, try just mounting them as drives on a Windows system and looking at the folder/file structure.

Z

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srellim234
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Thanks for the help, guys. Without access to a non-Windoes PC I couldn't try that solution, Rogue One, but I think szh is right that they don't have extensions on them a PC can read. They're just audio files.

I managed to see them after updating as as many drivers as I could and changed the J River software to recognize every format it possibly could. I can now see individual track length and the number of them on each CD. It's going to be fairly difficult to identify the songs and albums I'm not familiar with but that just gives me another lengthy project to work on.

I'll use the Media Jukebox to convert them to flac as I load them onto a separate hard drive. I'll type in the identifying tags for those I when I can find the information prior to loading. From there I'll burn him new CDs and make jewel cases including song names.

I hope they're not in too big of a hurry.


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