Ripping game-audio problem
 

Hello. I recently started playing the old game Gangsters Organized Crime. I own the original CD but Windows 7 cant play the music so when I play its just dead quiet. Id like to know how to rip the music from the CD in order to play it in the background while I play for maximum nostalgia. Ofc it would also be fine if I could simply play it from the CD somehow.

I have tried simply looking for the files myself but I cant find any files large enough for any music. I have also used a .CAB-extractor to look inside of the .CAB-file on the CD but theres no music to be found there either.

In my latest attempt I tried Game Audio Player but not even that program seems to find any music even though it says it supports that very game.

I hope somebody can help me.

I presumed, you are in CD-audio zone here. So you have two paths.

1. Grab any CD->mp3 convertor like, say, free CDEx and rip your favorite music on your HDD. :)

2. Make full disc copy, with audio, by any cloning software, like Alcohol 128% or CloneCD. Unfortunately, I am not aware about any free such prog. Then mount resulting image with Daemon Tools and play in emulated Windows 98. You can emulate Win98 machine with free Virtual PC 2007, but you need installs of Win98 itself to work.

Thanks a lot for your help. I tried both of your suggestions and I can find & rip the song-files on the CD using CDex but when I try to play them afterwards theyre blank. No sound on them. The program I used for playback is VLC.

When I mount the CD in Win98 (using VMware) I can see the CD just as I can see it in Windows 7 but I cant find any music, nor can I play it from the CD.

Hmm. It's very strange. If you was able to found music with CDEx, you must be able to play it!

I think, you did something wrong here, but I cannot guess where.

1. Did you seen several tracks with CDEx? First one must be data (it's your game), but second and all others is your music.

2. What format did you made with CDEx?

Well, point of mounting in Win98 is ability to play game with this music, not ripping it. :) Rip can be done in any system...

...Hmm, try to use forementioned http://www.imgburn.com/ for writing audio CD from CDEx files? :)

And, Japo, thank you for your suggestion! :) It looks great!

Maybe it's just too obvious to be mentioned, but perhaps the music tracks on your CD are empty?
I know for certain that I've encountered earlier a small number of game CD's from some re-distribute companies (like for example Heretic II in a small game compilation pack that I forgot the name of) that erased original music tracks on a game's CD and replaced them with small, empty dumps, saving space on the CD for additional files, like videos advertising other games. Thus the music tracks in the game are registered as being there, but don't play.

Maybe that's the case with your CD?

Well, even running the game in the Win98 emulator does not work. I mean the game works but the music does not.

I guess this is it. I cant even find any ripped CDs online of the game where the music is working. Bummer :(

Well, I... can see it in spades. And it's ISO - so no CD-audio. Strange... I will check it then further.

---edit---
Checked. Ugh. Original game have CD-Audio, but ISOs everywhere are not. I found several "right" images, but all of them except one was on (now dead) file servers, and only exclusion made with K3b on Linux and totally unreadable on Windows. :(

Right one image must be 500Mb.

Well, making a CD image of a Mixed-Mode CD (Data + CD music) in an ISO format is the dumbest thing one can do, since the ISO format (.iso) doesn't support anything except the data in an image. So if you know for sure a game had CD music in it, never download an ISO image of it.
For CD images with data and music in them BIN/ CUE format is probably the best, as it's also widely supported by all programs. Next best is MDF / MDS format from Alcohol, which is also quite often supported.

As most of this images are in archives, there is no way to determine what format it is. :) Fortunately, there was only couple of different files around. Nevermind, with my Linux friend I got Linux image right. So... godlike, do you need right image with soundtracks? :) It is on rutracker.org now, but I can re-upload it somewhere else.

Oh, yes. Please do so! Id be very grateful. Im not russian so I am having a hard time understanding the site you linked! Thanks in advance.

Sorry, I am... somewhat busy right now. I hope to upload game somewhere at weekend. Please wait me. Sorry again.

---update---

Here I am. And here is Gangsters: Part 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Be aware that it is v.1.0. It is works with soundtracks without problems. You can update game with newer patches, but in that case under Windows XP and up it will not found CD - use virtual machine with Windows 95/98. :) There is official "patch" that fixes CD issue. Unfortunately, it simply disable CD-player, so if you'll install it, you will lose CD-sountracks at all. Do not install it, if you need CD-audio!

I found also normal way to fix "missed CD" issue, but it is too complicate to implement. :) (If you want to try it: it's consist of setting fixes in Application Compatibility Toolkit: "Windows 95 compatibility mode"+"APILogger" fix).