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CD-DA audio

Many DOS games from the mid-1990s onwards used CD-DA (Red Book audio) tracks for music. These are standard audio tracks on a CD-ROM that bypass the sound card entirely, delivering studio-quality pre-recorded music directly from the game disc. DOSBox Staging supports CD-DA playback from disc images with audio tracks in various formats.

CD-DA playback requires no special configuration. Mount a disc image with audio tracks using the MOUNT command and the game will handle playback automatically.

Supported disc image formats

CD-DA audio tracks are supported in the following disc image formats:

  • CUE/BIN — CUE sheet with binary data files. This is the most common format for disc images with audio tracks. Audio tracks can be stored as raw PCM in the BIN file or as separate compressed audio files (see below).

  • MDS/MDF — Alcohol 120% disc image format.

  • ISO — Standard ISO 9660 images. Note: ISO images only contain data tracks; they cannot contain audio tracks. Use CUE/BIN for discs with audio.

Supported audio track formats

When using CUE sheets, audio tracks can reference compressed audio files instead of raw PCM data in BIN files. The following audio formats are supported:

  • FLAC — Free Lossless Audio Codec. Recommended for lossless compression.
  • Opus — Modern lossy codec with excellent quality at low bitrates.
  • Ogg Vorbis — Widely used lossy codec.
  • MP3 — MPEG-1 Layer 3.
  • WAV — Uncompressed PCM audio.

The standard Red Book audio format is 44.1 kHz, 16-bit stereo PCM. Mono audio tracks are automatically converted to stereo during playback.

Mixer channel

CD-DA audio is output to the CDAUDIO mixer channel for mounted CD-ROM images.