Direct Audio CD Duplication in Windows
 

While this is primarily a video forum, I thought I'd put my audio question out there and see if anyone has any suggestions.

I do mobile DJ'ing on the side on weekends (birthday parties, weddings, etc), and I have a need to duplicate audio CD's on occasion.

I had a stand-alone CD duplicator which recently died. I'm not ready to spend the money on a new one, since my needs for duplicating CD's have decreased since I first purchased it. Instead, I'd like to use the multiple CD/DVD drives on my computer to make direct cd-to-cd copies.

I'd like to maintain the lead-in, lead-out, track pre-gaps and timings etc. so that back-up copies of commercial CD's still come up in a CD ripping program with metadata FreeDB and AccurateRip, etc. (It's also annoying to individually rip tracks and then burn them to a new CD... too much manual work involved when you're making many copies or copies of many CD's.) The only way I've found to do an EXACT copy is by ripping a WAV file and creating a CUE sheet, then re-burning this to the target CD using something like CDBurnerXP or Exact Audio Copy.

This process is painfully slow compared to my old standalone CD duplicator... does anyone know of a (preferably FREE) piece of software for Windows 7 that can simulate the function of the CD duplicator using the drives in my desktop, rather than manually ripping the source CD to HDD then burning as 2 separate steps?

What exactly isn't working right with a standard disc to disc copy? I haven't had any problems with CDDB, etc. with any of the copies I have made over the years and many of those CDs are continuous mixes with no breaks between tracks (some ancient CD recording software would add a 2 sec. pregap to every track!). Make sure you select "Disc-at-once"/DAO as your recording method. That should retain the pre-gaps.

I guess I'm not sure what process you're referring to when you say "standard disc copy?"

The CUE sheet + WAV method works fine with CDDB and Accurate Rip because it preserves track timings/gaps.... but is there a better way to achieve this?

Oh.. the "copy or grab disc" function? Yeah that worked just fine... d'oh! :smack: