DOSBox Staging 0.83 CD-DA Audio: Disc Image and Track Format Reference

Many DOS games from the mid-1990s onward used CD-DA (Red Book audio) tracks for music. These are standard audio tracks on a CD-ROM that bypass the sound card entirely and deliver pre-recorded music directly from the game disc. DOSBox Staging 0.83 supports CD-DA playback from disc images whose audio tracks are stored in various formats.

How CD-DA playback works

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. Because these tracks bypass the sound card, CD-DA does not depend on the emulated sound card configuration in the same way synthesizer music does.

Setup steps

• Prepare a disc image that contains the audio tracks (see the format notes below).
• Mount that image inside DOSBox Staging using the MOUNT command, following the mounting CD-ROM images documentation for your version.
• Launch the game. It will handle CD-DA playback automatically; no separate CD-DA setting needs to be changed.

Supported disc image formats

• CUE/BIN — a CUE sheet with binary data files; 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.
• MDS/MDF — the Alcohol 120% disc image format.
• ISO — standard ISO 9660 images. ISO images only contain data tracks and cannot contain audio tracks; use CUE/BIN for discs with audio.

Supported audio track formats

• FLAC — Free Lossless Audio Codec, noted as recommended for lossless compression.
• Opus — modern lossy codec with high quality at low bitrates.
• Ogg Vorbis — widely used lossy codec.
• MP3 — MPEG-1 Layer 3.
• WAV — uncompressed PCM audio.