Alcohol 52% vs bchunk

Alcohol 52% creates virtual CD/DVD-ROM drives so users can play discs without the physical media. It supports up to 31 virtual drives and can mount optical images in formats including CCD, CUE, ISO, BWF, CDI, MDS, and NRG. The listed downloads are for Windows, excluding Windows 98 and ME. A free 15-day evaluation period is available, with capabilities limited only by the number of virtual drives available. The Free Edition is also listed at free and is marked not for business use. A paid single licence costs 27.00 USD once and includes lifetime free upgrades; online activation is required. The maker describes home users backing up game CDs and movie DVDs, as well as librarians and school administrators archiving recordable media. DVD titles protected with CSS cannot be backed up due to legal restrictions. Support options include manuals, FAQs, a support forum, and direct email contact. The privacy policy says users may choose to join the Bright Data network for some premium features and can turn that setting off in the app.

bchunk is a free command-line utility that converts CD images and tracks. It accepts a .bin image, a .cue index containing track types and offsets, and an output basename. BIN/CUE and RAW/CUE inputs can produce ISO or CDR output. The -w option writes audio tracks as WAV files, while -s changes the byte order of audio samples. For MODE2/2352 tracks, -p handles PlayStation mode by outputting 2336 bytes from offset 0; -r writes raw 2352-byte data from offset 0. The README identifies the program as binchunker version 1.2.2 and describes compiling with make and installing with make install. Its changelog records fixes for a heap-based buffer overflow and a null access violation and crash caused by malformed CUE files. bchunk runs on Linux and macOS, is released under the GNU GPL version 2 or later, and has no GitHub releases listed.