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

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.