Hi I have a CD with a song hidden before the first track. To hear it on a CD player you have to start track 1 playing and use the "skip backwards" button to reverse BEFORE track 1. The normal track 1 starts at

"Track 1, Index 1, 0:00"

The track time at the beginning of the hidden track is listed at

"Track 1, Index 0, -4:15".

The problem I have is that I can find no software that allows me to extract this hidden song as a wav. I tried using the gap detection functions in EAC but when I append the gap to the start of Track 1 and extract the wav, there is just silence before the normal Track 1 begins. Can anybody help?

Yes, you need a drive that is able to read to read that kind of index-0 gaps.

The SCSI Ultraplex 40x is able to do it.
Old TEAC drives are probably able to do it too.
I would also try new IDE Plextors.

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread....ight=Ultraplex

I don't think LiteOns and other Mediatek based drives can do it.
What drives do you have?

Well you pretty much answered my question and I have now extracted the song. I have a CD-RW drive and a DVD-ROM drive, and previously I was only using the CD-RW. I tried ripping from the DVD-ROM drive and the full, 2 song wav was extracted easily.

I am a bit of a novice and was labouring under the misapprehension that any CD drive should be pretty much able to read any area of a CD. Is this not the case? Is this Index-0 song stored on an unusual part of the CD?

For the record my drives are described by Nero as follows:

Master: ATAPI DVD-ROM 16XMax
Slave: CD-RW CDR-6S52

Many thanks for your help.

As you can see, that is not the case.

Index-0 before track 1 should be a silence gap of 2 or 3 seconds before the start of the disc.
Putting music there is out of specifications of Red Book, so there's no need that drives read that part.

Lucky that a "no name" drive was able to rip it.

http://www.feurio.com/English/faq/fa...le_index.shtml
http://www.feurio.com/English/faq/fa...ex0music.shtml

I could be wrong, but I think the Red Book says that the pause of the first track must be >= 2 seconds. If this is true then it is perfectly legal to put a song in the pause of track 1. Thus, all drives that claim CD-Audio support should handle this.

well, yes, I guess that there are different revisions about the Red Book, I don't know....
But anyway, it's supposed that this index-0 contains silence (in fact all index-0 are supposed to contain silence) and there's no need to read that part.

You can even read "contradictions" from the same web:
http://www.feurio.com/English/Writer...INDEX1_G000300
http://www.feurio.com/English/faq/fa...rsttrack.shtml

But I think that it's clear that putting music there is out of specifications.
The fact is that a lot of drives can't play or rip that part (My Ultraplex can do it, the LG can't).