audio disc mount behavior

[worker201]

I inserted an audio disc the other day, in order to rip a track. I thought it would be kinda interesting to look at the audio cd contents, so I went over to the folder where a cd would normally be mounted, /media/cdrom. Nothing was there. It appeared as if the audio disc was never actually mounted, at least not in the same way that you would mount a hard disk.

Does anyone know how Linux treats audio cds? Do they get mounted? And if so, where? This isn't important, I mean, I did what I was planning to do - I just was curious, and wanted some information.

btw, as an aside, if a cd is playable in a normal stereo and a portable disc player, but one track is unplayable and unrippable in 2 different computers, is that track pretty much unaccessible? One of the finer tracks from Return to the Valley of the Go-Go's, "The Whole World Lost its Head" is the track I refer to here, a track I would very much like to have in digital format.

[Tux]

No they are not mounted, CDDA is just read straight off the disc.
To 'mount' a music CD you need the CDFS driver which, the last time I checked, hadn't been maintained for months.
It allowed you to mount the CD ( -t cdfs ) and view the contents as WAV files and do whatever you pleased with them, it used to work well on some of the weaker copy-protection systems on "Crippled Disc" albums (Sony/EMI usually).

[Tux]

btw, as an aside, if a cd is playable in a normal stereo and a portable disc player, but one track is unplayable and unrippable in 2 different computers, is that track pretty much unaccessible? One of the finer tracks from Return to the Valley of the Go-Go's, "The Whole World Lost its Head" is the track I refer to here, a track I would very much like to have in digital format.

Home electronics CD players tend to be better at dealing with (read: ignoring) errors, computers will tend to get their knickers in a twist.
You could try using CDDA2WAV which tends to be less finnicky than cdparanoia or try a drive that is better at audio extraction.
Lite-no/Sony tend to be fast and not too bad with errors, NEC are slower but deal with errors better.

Finally, you could try an audio loopback like zorg.