Burn iTunes playlist to Audio Image

Question

I have Snow Leopard on an early model MacBook Pro. The CD Drive has been giving me fits the last few months -- I stick a blank CD in it, and it claims it's bad and spits it out. I can go through a pile of brand-new CD's and it will choose 1 out of 7 that it wants to use, even though all the CD's come from the same package. The rejected CD's work fine on a Linux machine I have.

I need to burn an audio CD from iTunes and my thought was:

1. Burn playlist to audio CD Image file (Red Book image?)
2. Copy ISO file to Linux Machine
3. Use Linux machine to burn audio image to a CD

But looking around, it doesn't seem that iTunes on OSX will support this. I was wondering if anyone else has accomplished this.

Solution

I am pretty familiar with various CD and disk image formats. You used the right keyword for Mac OSX. You are correct: a *.ISO image would used for this purpose.
Use http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/33355/virtual-cd-rw to create the virtual CD. Now use iTunes to burn your disk. Select the CD Burner by the name of " VIRTUAL CDRW". After that, it mounts the virtual CD to your computer. Next, to save your CD image, eject the "CD" from the computer, using Finder or iTunes. It uses the BIN/CUE format, so the complete file is actually two files.

The only way I have heard of to get BIN/CUE to an ISO is via Toast. As I do not own Toast (that might change soon), I cannot test this for sure. In all of my searching, I did not find anything particularly useful for reading or converting BIN/CUE in Mac. The only thing I was able to convert BIN/CUE to was a set of unreadable *.iso##.cdr files, from BinChunker. This may be a Mac quirk, so try BinChunker in Linux. It might work there. Linux may also be able to work with the multipart ISO. From my research, BinChunker appears to be an overwhelming success, so I may be having a platform issue.

However, I do not (at the moment) have my Linux VM working so I cannot say if any of this is readable/burnable by Linux. I suspect it may be, but all I do know is that it is nearly impossible to get it read or converted in OSX.

Good luck!

Comments

[NReilingh]

It might be worth it to find some computer-electronics-grade compressed air and blow out the optical drive... I've heard that can help sick drives.

[NReilingh]

He needs to burn an audio CD to an ISO. Burning as data just tells iTunes you want it to copy the digital files verbatim.

[MikeHoss]

I didn't know the right words. I want to create an audio image. I will rephrase my question.