Do Audio CDs work with any USB CDROM Drive in Classic MacOS?

danifunker

New Tinkerer
Oct 11, 2025
3
4
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Greetings Everyone!

I'm working on a USB based CDROM drive emulator and currently running into some snags when it comes to handling CD Playback, and just trying to explore what might be going on here.

I've also tried using a couple of different CD audio disks with a couple of different USB CD-ROM drives and they seem to just eject once the disc seems loaded on Classic MacOS 9.2.2. Everything works fine on OSX 10.4. I was wondering if this was a specific limitation with the USB Stack of MacOS 9.2 and if there are any known work-arounds.

If there are any USB CDROMs that support CD Audio in OS9.2, can you please let me know the model name? I would like to get one so I can continue extending my project to support CDDA and mixed-mode discs for Classic MacOS. Thanks in advance!
 

ClassicHasClass

Tinkerer
Aug 30, 2022
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www.floodgap.com
I think this boils down to Mac OS 9 simply seeing the USB drive as regular mass storage. To the best of my knowledge audio was only supported for internal drives (and SCSI external drives for historical reasons). I suspect you'll get the same issue with a FireWire CD-ROM or anything emulating one as well.
 

danifunker

New Tinkerer
Oct 11, 2025
3
4
3
Maybe this has something to do with the cd audio filesystem extension in Classic Mac? I might try to explore that once I rule all of this other stuff out.

I don’t believe that Classic MacOS has digital audio support, is anyone able confirm?