Create mountable CDDA image from audio files

Hi everybody,

I actually have only one question: How can I (if possible) make an Windows-readable image file from my audio files?

Everything I tried doesn't work and for the files (BIN/CUE) I have created I get an error "Windows can't access the disk. The disk may be corrupt..." and I can't figure out any way to make a simple audio image

Here's a brief summary of what I'm doing:

1. Rip my Audio CD's to a lossless format and store them on independent drives, then deposit the physical discs in a storage to save space.
2. In addition to the lossless audio files I create a lossy duplicate to put on my Walkman (Sony NW-A25 digital media player)
3. ... and here comes the part I am having troubles with:

With "normal" audio tracks everything's fine, but the troublesome files are "mixed" disks (I mean like live sets or recordings without a gap - gapless - tracks).
When being converted to lossless files there's no problem at all, but the microSD card on my Walkman is limited to 128 GB (which most of you will find more then enough), but I'm a bit of an audiophile and absolute music addict, so I separate my music library into categories.
That means, music where there's no significant decrease in "audible" quality (like with electronic or synthetic instruments) may be lossy and where there's a wide or dynamic range of instruments or voices should be lossless.

The problem is with the lossy copies of so called gapless tracks (like mentioned before). The mp3 file standard does not support gapless playback, since every wave of music is converted into small blocks of digital data which is filled with "silence" if the audio is less then the block size.

Until now only the Sony Music Center for PC is capable of creating gapless mp3 files.
Here is the part where I need an audio image file. The software can "import" an Audio CD and save it as gapless mp3.
Sure, I could go with lossless, but there's not enough space on my memory card to store everything lossless, hence the division.
The problem is that I am about 1000 miles away from my physical disks and can't access them now.
Now many may criticize me, but still I hope to get some answers here.

Many thanks in advance

Hopefully I'm understanding this correctly.

I understand that you want gapless audio files, but in order to save space on your Sony player you need to use a lossy format. The problem is that MP3 does not have native gapless support.

Did I get that correct?

If so, what other formats does your Sony support? If it supports WMA, have you considered converting your lossless files to that format? WMA does support gapless tracks.

EDIT: I see that you are also asking about creating a mountable ISO image with your audio files. Are you specifically wanting to create an ISO image that is standard CD Audio format, or can that ISO image contain other file types such as MP3, WMA, etc.?

@hsehestedt Many thanks for your time!

hsehestedt said:

I understand that you want gapless audio files, but in order to save space on your Sony player you need to use a lossy format. The problem is that MP3 does not have native gapless support.
Did I get that correct?

Yes.

hsehestedt said:

If so, what other formats does your Sony support?

MP3, WMA (Non-DRM), AAC (Non-DRM), HE-AAC, FLAC, ALAC, AIFF, Linear PCM, MP4

hsehestedt said:

have you considered converting your lossless files to that format? WMA does support gapless tracks.

No, somehow I got used to mp3 and never thought of switching to something else. But it's good to know that.
Are there any disadvantages using wma? Does it support ID3Tags and album art?

hsehestedt said:

EDIT: I see that you are also asking about creating a mountable ISO image with your audio files. Are you specifically wanting to create an ISO image that is standard CD Audio format, or can that ISO image contain other file types such as MP3, WMA, etc.?

I need an image file that the "Sony Music Center for PC" will recognize as "Audio CD"
Is there any way to create such an image file from just audio tracks?

Here is a bit of information on the topic of tagging:

Professional Tag Editor for MP3 (ID3) and WMA - CodeProject

As for advantages or disadvantages of formats other than MP3, I must admit to not really knowing a great deal on topic. I'm not really aware of any disadvantages for WMA, but I'm sure that anyone else looking in on this thread has any thoughts on the topic, they will let us know.

No - Burning WMA files, MP3 files, etc. to an ISO image would simply be a way of storing of them as data on a CD, DVD, etc. You may need to look at the help for the Sony software to see if it can handle such types of discs. If it truly is looking for a standard "Audio CD" format, then that implies the disc would need to contain music files in uncompressed 16-bit WAV file with a sampling rate of 44.1Khz.

Update:
________________________________________
After another couple of hours spent on the web I finally found something that seemed promising... and... it worked!

I can simply select my audio files and create an Audio Image file with Daemon Tools Ultra (which is shareware, but worth the deal).
Tried WAV and FLAC and got an MDX image file that can also be mounted with Daemon Tools and is recognized by the Sony Software.

With the "Sony Music Center for PC" I get perfectly gapless mp3 files with album art.

Only two steps to process:

1. select audio files & create audio image
2. import with Sony Software as mp3 320 CBR

PS.: I use mp3tag ID3Tag Editor which is really powerful (eg. tag and rename files) and free.