Paging the Hardy Boys for "The Mystery of the Invisible CD Tracks"

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m a recreational CD burner. I like to make mixes, consolidate albums onto one CD by picking and choosing just the songs I like, etc. All considered fair use and well within my rights to do as a consumer who paid for the original CDs in question.

Among my recent purchases are Santana’s two newest CDs, “Supernatural” and “Shaman.” I like some of the songs and not others, so it made sense for me to combine the tracks I like onto one CD so I don’t have to keep skipping the sucky tracks. Here’s where I ran into a problem.

According to my computer (I use Adaptec’s Easy CD Creator 4), there are no music tracks on “Shaman.” Never mind that I’ve listened to them. It plays fine on my stereo, and in my car. When I play it on my PC, on the other hand, first a little program for something called BandLink pops up; if I cancel that, Windows Media Player will start playing the music. I’ve used Easy CD Creator to COPY “shaman” in its entirety and that went fine. But when I tried to go in and choose just certain tracks, the only thing that’s visible is the BandLink folder.

Please HELP! I don’t want to have to keep clicking past all the crap songs forever.

2

Sounds like the CD has copy protection on it. The “Bandlink” term can used with other choice terms to do a Google search on how to handle it.

If you turn off autoinsert notification (a good idea regardless), you might be able to look at the raw sessions using suitable software.

3

Looks like you bought a ‘copy protected CD’

Bandlink’s website:
http://www.bandlink.com/blink/

Sure enough, the Santana CD is one of theirs:
http://fan.bandlink.com/list.cfm

My advice: return this ‘CD’ as defective, and make sure you explain to everyone who asks exactly why you are returning it.

4

Okay. Windows Media Player can see the music tracks. It looks like I’ll be able to use WMP to copy the tracks I want to a CD, and then I can merge that disc with the tracks I want from “Supernatural.”

I’ll try it when I get home tonight. Hope it works.

5

You could always rip the songs through an analog source.

6

Do you have a CD player that has a headphone jack?

If so, connect the headphone jack to the “line in” port on your sound card. Play the song, and record it on your machine. Rip the resulting .wav file into .mp3 format. Done.

I have done this with quite a few of my cassettes, and it works great.

O

7

well, I actually want CD audio rather than an mp3.

Update: Windows Media Player can see the music tracks on this disk… but I can’t figure out how to use it to pull those tracks OFF the CD.

Sigh. guess I’ll have to owe a favor to our audio engineer.

8

Take my advice above, record them to .wav files, and then burn an audio cd.

O

9

One question: Wouldn’t this result in the whole album being one long track with no breaks? or do I have to do it one track at a time? (actually, since I’m skipping a bunch of tracks I guess it WOULD have to be done a track at a time.)

Sorry if it’s a stupid question - this just isn’t my area.

10

It is fairly easy. Open windows Sound Recorder (Or click Start, Run and type in sndrec32 and hit enter, same thing). Click on the button with the red dot, then hit play on the cd player that you are using to feed the audio stream in with. Once the song is done, click the button with the black square on it to stop recording, then go to File, Save As, and save the song where you can find it again. Do this for each song that you want to capture.

Then, go to your CD burning software, and set up an audio CD session. Drag and drop the .wav files you just created into the layout, and rearrange to your liking. Then simply burn the CD.

If you have any questions at all, please post them and I will help you!

O