How to copy audio CDs?

Ok, I might be doing something stupid here, but how on earth do you go about duplicating an audio CD?

First of all, before people start up on it, I'm not wanting to copy anything for a friend illegally or anything like that. I just want to make a copy so I can listen to it in the car when I go to a New Year party (5 hour trip) and I don't want to take the original.

I've imported into iTunes and I could just burn a playlist from there. But the CD (which is Brian Wilson's Smile) is a "flowing" album, i.e. the songs merge into each other. You know how crap iTunes is with gaps between songs, etc. Even if I burn an iTunes CD with "No gap" in the preferences, there is still a small annoying pause. (PLEASE APPLE FIX THIS!)

I know you can copy CDs using Disc Utility, but it doesn't seem to let me copy a commercial CD. It appears that Apple is covering its back. Is there a way to do it using Disc Utility, or does anyone know of a free program that will take care of it for me? By the way, I don't have or want to purchase Toast. Thanks.

edesignuk said:

Using disk utility can you make an image of the CD then burn copies from the image?

Click to expand...

When I select "New image" the "New image from disc" is greyed out. I inserted a photo CD that I made to compare it and it wasn't greyed out on that. So it appears there is some sort of copy protection on the Smile CD.

I can select New image from the toolbar but that just seems to create a blank disc image that is 600 odd megs in size. I guess I could try to drag the audio files from the CD into this image, but I'm sure I'd just end up with a data CD that had some AIFF files on it.

Call me stupid, but ever since they merged Disc Copy and Disc Utility from Jaguar to Panther, I've neveer understood how to copy a bloody disc...

Thanks, that's an idea, although it's a bit limiting having just one track.

I guess I'll have to fire up the old PC and try to see if I can do anything on that. But I thought Macs would be less protective than Windows when it came to copying things, as Windows loves its security keys and registrations and stuff!