Proposal for hosting CD rips
 

Going through some old CD games and am finding a few already that, if ripped as an ISO, are small enough to be hosted on AB. Since, as most know, ISO rips do not include the audio tracks that typically make up the background music for a game, we would have to go without music. That is not the worst thing that can happen but I have been experimenting with an approach that I want to get feedback on.

When I rip the audio tracks by themselves and compress them from wave files into mp3 the result is a very manageable set of files as far as size is concerned. If we were to offer the compressed (mp3) soundtrack as an extra for a game that is an ISO rip then there are three options that a person has in downloading and playing the game.

1. Download the ISO only and play the game without background music.

2. Download the ISO and soundtrack and play the music alongside the game using an mp3 player. (this has worked well for me on a couple occasions).

3. Download the ISO and soundtrack and use burning software (such as Nero etc) that can combine the two back together and create a CD very much like the original (automatically expanding the mp3 back into wav files). The only difference being a very slight loss of fidelity from compressing the wave files to mp3 and then expanding them again.

I was surprised to find how small of a complete package can be made from CDs that started in the 350 to 450 MB range (depending on their make up). Most games this size that I have attempted have finished up less than 150MB and some under 100MB.

So, the question remains. Is a soundtrack that might be in the 20MB to 50MB range worth the trouble? Can we spare the bandwidth? ISO Cellar is great for those occasions when the game is simply too large to host but the inability to have an AB review, extras and an active forum for those games makes me want to get them on the main site when possible.

Thoughts?

If I recall correctly, don't some virtual drives permit a combination of a cuesheet and MP3-compressed audio tracks?

yeah, that works. i don't remember who but i think japorfan made this alone in the dark 3 mp3 cue image back then. i don't know if it's the version we have in the iso cellar but it might be it

The point is, this kind of compression might produce rips complete with music, yet sufficiently small to host on the main site.

Exactly. I put a cue sheet like that together for Alone In The Dark 1 but for some reason the game only played the first track. DOSBox has, as part of their tutorial (see bottom of page), an example of how to do this. They defined the tracks as type "ogg" (which, from what I understand, is some kind of container) but mp3 works as well.

The great thing about that type of cue sheet is that when I went to burn it using Nero, the burning software converted the mp3 files back into waves and I ended up with what amounted to a copy of the original CD (about 330MB if I remember correctly). I could have downloaded the ISO and mp3 tracks at about 80MB. Of course, the size of the mp3 files depends on what bitrate you use when you rip them. Obviously, the higher the bitrate the less loss of fidelity.

yes, of course