Music CD with no audio files?

Hello all...

So, this is a way-off question but I'm curious if anyone has ever encountered a factory-made music CD with no audio files on it?

I recently purchased a second-hand CD that seems to be defective. It's in mint condition and I can see quite clearly that it is a professionally made factory disk, but when I load it, file explorer opens it like storage media. All that it has on it is a single zip file. The zip contains a handful of files of different types but none are audio.

It's a strange one and I guess I'm also keeping an open mind to the possibility that something is wrong with my PC but since I'm not having issues with other music CDs, I don't think that the machine is the problem.

Wow, this is going back some years for me, but I have seen audio CDs that also had a data track on them. I wonder if this is a CD that has multiple sessions and has both audio and data.

Maybe you need to look at the CD with a utility like Nero, or something else that can report the details about what is actually on that disc.

Again, it's been a long time since I looked at that sort of thing so maybe someone else can offer some more details on how to look at that disc.

Enable show hidden files / folders and have a second look.

Go to ---isobuster.com --- and download the trial version.
Whatever files are on the disc will be available for inspection.

Ok. Let me try some of these suggestions and report back. Thank you!

- - - Updated - - -

Ok... So, When I load the disk into the PC, it reads it and immediately opens an Explorer window like it's storage media. The disk does not play or show any tracks in Windows Audio Player.

Unfortunately, I do not have an actual standalone CD player. With hidden files shown, this is what's on the disk. There is a data file that's just over a half GB.

Question: Could that be disc 2 of a 2 disc set?

I recall purchasing CDs back in the old days that came as a 2 disc set where one disc was the music disc and it came with a second disc that had PC data on it.

Huh, found info about this. Check this out...

Reddit - Dive into anything

hsehestedt said:

Huh, found info about this. Check this out...

Reddit - Dive into anything

Well, that's what I got. As far as I can tell from the sleeve, this is a single-disk album.

Good find but I'm not sure what that boils down to. It sounds like I would need software to do anything with it. Totally bizarre that they would release an album in this format. I can't imagine that a CD player would be able to play it either.