Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions What the hell did I buy??

I picked up Graceland last night and went to play it. Nothing.

Then I notice a blurb on the back of the disc talking about computer requirements. I have an enhanced CD. wtf??

There is one folder on the cd that contains .mov files. So what the hell format is the audio encoding in??

!!*@!$@** studios!!

Maybe try it in your dvd player. I don't know what an enhanced cd is either.

Enhanced CDs usually just have multimedia extras on the disc, but otherwise should play just fine as normal CDs. I may have had trouble back when they were first popular, but I don't recall.

It means it's enhanced with flavor!

You have to hold it against your tongue and then spin it on your finger. Then you will hear and TASTE the songs!

Sean, start working on real products, seriously. Your idea made me think of Ratatouille, by the way.

You know, I'm starving right now. That's got to be coloring my thoughts.

Regina should be there cooking for you.

Because if she's doing that just because I want her to, then I've arrived.

I think we're still too on-topic.

Thanks, but I think your explanations are too technical. I think I posted in the wrong area.

I am using the CD/DVD player in my computer. Media Monkey does not recognize the disc. Windows Media Player plays the disc, but I get no sound.

MOV seems to be an apple type thing. A container for holding audio, video and whatever other files. Probably DRMed too. I guess I need to check discs more carefully before buying.

“.mov” is a QuickTime file. I use this to play them QuickTime 7

There are codecs for many media players allowing them to play “.mov“ files.

There are also converters that will turn them into just about any other format you want. None of them I have found had any DRM but doesn’t mean it can’t happen.

I can’t recommend any of the codecs or converters because I just use the QT player.

AFAIK there is not an easy way to get Media Monkey to play them but my info is out of date

Enhanced CDs are still supposed to have normal CD data. It's just that they use leftover space for extras. I remember, now, running into trouble ripping Enhanced CDs, on the final tracks, but I don't remember ever having trouble playing them as normal CDs. Still, I'm sure someone out there figured out how to bungle them. If that's truly the case with Graceland, my condolences.

I have a couple of enhanced cd's and winamp surfs through the junk and finds just the audio so I can then rip it to the HDD. AnyDVD running in the background might be helping things along as well

Unfortunately there's a chance that the first time you inserted the disc it autoplayed and installed some crap that's messing with your ability to extract the audio too.

I always disable Autoplay the first time I start using a Windows machine.

Yeah, sounds like there's another problem with the disc--it should have regular CD tracks, too.

Guys, there's always the chance that Fred isn't that enhanced, hence the compatibility issue

Possible but not likely. I am running Vista and actually think UAC and secure desktop are good things. I can live with the popups.

Thats why I suspect DRM. I'm thinking the audio and whatever other tracks are in the .mov files and the only way to get them out is by installing their ap.

I will install a 3rd part quicktime ap tonight to see if it is able to extract audio files from the .mov's

Dean. I did some searches on the MM site last night and it looks like they still don't handle this format well.

Jay. I will try winamp if the ap I downloaded dosn't work.

Thanks for your help eveyone.

You could always just install Quicktime...

I still think the disc is simply defective. Everything I've heard about enhanced CDs says that they have redbook tracks in addition to computer readable media.

But some of those discs don't follow the Redbook spec to 100%. They try things which will confuse CD-ROM drives but still play correctly in a stand-only player. Unfortunately, these aberrations do confuse some players which can read the ISO9660 file system (like players which can find MP3s on discs). To get around the use on the computer, the "enhanced" section of the disc includes a special player to run on the computer.

So, yes, the disc is defective, but the manufacturer wanted it that way.

I'd return it as defective. If they require an exchange for the same title, return the next one too. Keep it up until all the copies in the store have been opened. But then I'm an ass like that.

Welcome to the forum.

Much as I would like to be an ass like that, I picked it up second hand. Caveat emptor I guess.

From what I have found in multiple searches, there is no one standard for enhanced cd.

I had a similar problem with one particular enhanced CD. It would not automatically load into any player when "Opened" (autoplay is turned off for reasons mentioned above) or it would only open the extra video menu.

However, it would play the songs on a regular CD/DVD player. The workaround seemed to be to go into Winamp, right click in on a non-button area to get the right click menu and then choose [Play] then [Audio CD] or something close to that.

In the end, I ripped the music into flac files with EAC which had no trouble recognizing the audio only files and I put the CD into storage, not caring about the extras much anyways.

Even with Autoplay turned off, Windows will still load the content of the autoplay.inf if you double-click on the CD-ROM icon--it just doesn't do it automatically when the disc is inserted. The only way to perform any other function is to right-click on the drive's icon and pick something from that context menu.

Windows 7 is a little better in this regard, as you can customize the automatic, insertion action for different types of media. But still it tries to autoplay when the icon is opened by double-click.

Have you tried a real CD player? If the audio cable inside your computer isn't running from your CD/DVD-ROM to your sound card, you may not be able to hear the sound using Windows Media Player. If you must use your computer, try using CDex from http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/ . It's always shown me the audio tracks AND the enhanced portion of the disc. You can play the tracks from that program if you wish, but it's mostly a tool for ripping (copying) CDs to your computer.

From what I remember, a normal, unenhanced CD will have many cda files on the disc if you open it as a cd-rom in a computer. They're < 50 bytes I believe and likely point to the actual audio on the CD somehow. An enhanced CD doesn't have these. My assumption is that without these files, some media players (the ones that don't require that audio cable inside your computer) require those files to be there in order to find the audio on an audio CD.