I don’t know if there’s anything you can do about that, except say “don’t ask me again.” It will still pop to the front every time the disc is inserted, though.

Annoyingly, iTunes will jump up and ask to import the audio tracks. It will show up on your desktop as one volume if it’s just a data track, or two volumes if it also has data.

So does cdrdao, but since dd comes with OS X, we’ll just use that. The dd utility, however, seems to work just fine. When it had both data and audio tracks, hdiutil would fail during the copy with an unhelpful “input/output error” message. I was able to create a playable disc image using hdiutil, but only when the disc had only data. The latter is not part of the default OS X tool set, but you can install it with Mac Ports (or build it yourself from source, but it’s easier to use Mac Ports). The command-line tools I am aware of for doing direct-access imaging of storage devices on a Mac are hdiutil, dd, and cdrdao.

That left me with the command line tools for direct CD/DVD access. Most directions on how to image Playstation game discs start with “download this shitty Windows software…” or “launch your $70 copy of some professional-grade Mac OS X disc authoring software.” I wanted to accomplish this task without using any shady crapware or expensive commercial software. I don’t see a point in using any of these proprietary formats or tools. Various commercial ripping tools have their own file extensions, and maybe even their own image formats. I just call it an image file and the file extension is arbitrary, but some emulators want the “.iso” extension, and you might have to rename it to that. There is no one file extension associated with a disc image like this, as far as I can tell. We need a byte-for-byte copy of the original disc with all of its tracks. At best, you will lose the audio tracks at worst, you have an image that doesn’t contain all of the game code. However, you cannot make an ISO out of a multi-session disc or a disc with audio tracks the format doesn’t allow for it. You may be familiar with the term “ISO”, a kind of disk image that is often used for software distribution. This makes them a little trickier than straight data discs which are fairly simple to image using the GUI application Disk Utility.

In order to preserve a copy of a game that you own, you must make an “image” of the full CD. Many Playstation game discs (especially earlier games) have a data track and one or more audio tracks such as the kind that play in a standard CD player.

Use cd with playstation emulator mac