Virtual CD-R in Windows?
 

Alright, this is a bit of an odd problem--I'm looking for a program sort of like Daemon Tools, that emulates a CD drive at the windows hardware level, but I need a program that emulates a CD-R drive so I can trick another program into burning to a "CD" when it's actually burning to an ISO file on my hard drive. Any of you know a program that can do this?

I know Nero and programs like that have a "burn to image" option, but this doesn't work from without the program, i.e. if you perhaps wanted Audible Manager to burn to an ISO image for whatever reason. Like say your MP3 player isn't Audible-ready so you can't listen to any of the programs your silly parents bought you, thinking it would be easy to transfer them to MP3 format. Or something.

It seems like a pretty obvious util but I haven't been able to find anything that can do it. If it exists, somebody on here has to know about it. :D Cheers and thanks.

Have you tried Alcohol 120%?

What's the difference in this case whether it burns to ISO or CD? You can create an ISO from the CD.

Is your Audible example what you're actually trying to do?

What she said.

Yeah, it is. I want to go straight to ISO mostly to not waste 10 or 15 blank CDs, since all I want is the MP3 end-product anyway.

FlamingPeach and docbungle: I've tried Alcohol 120% (version 1.4.6), but unless I'm totally missing something it doesn't have this option. Is there something I'm overlooking? Thanks.

There's something fundamentally wrong with intercepting burn information and then routing it to an ISO file. I'd have to look up some information first, but I think that it outside the scope of reasonable possibility.

It's one thing to create a hdd partition and spoof a CDROM drive, but something entirely different to intercept outbound information. Not sure though.

EDIT: Meh, didn't read all the posts.

while its certainly possible its unlikely you'd ever see it out of somewhere developing CDR software, particulary since not all CDR's are the same, and to use it with most burining software you'd have to emulate an actual available drive.

its an interesting problem though. however we'd have to know more about the software you are planning to burn with, since it may only have a limited drive set its compatible with,

If you don't want Alcohol 120% (which kicks arse, incidentally), try CloneCD. It works sufficiently, if you don't have A120% ;)

Well, surprisingly I don't think such a program exists, so I just went ahead and burned each disk onto a CD-RW, ripped the RW into an MP3, erased it, then burned the next disk. Major pain in the ass, but when is copy protection anything but? Thanks anyway.

iso recorder

iso recorder, alcohol 120, clonecd don't do this.

i'm still voting on the doesn't exist outside very specific hardware and software developers.

not that dificult actualy
 

this would not be that difficult to set up actually. all you would need to do is too code a custom driver that tells win32 that there is a burner attached to the system. it would show up as just another drive. then you would have the driver take the data it receives and instead of passing it on to the EDIE interface it would put it into a iso file. I think the same thing was done a while ago for audio devices.
now I have not done any device driver codeing, so I could be tragically misinformed but it I am pretty sure that this would work.

http://www.opensound.com/virtmix.html
look at the bottom "loopback recording"
this is for *nix only and not free but it does prove that vitual devices are not imposible.