Okay, some notes on emulators and virtual machine options. First of all, QEMU is indeed a pretty good all-around choice if you want to both virtualize and emulate modern computer architectures where the binary software being executed is predominantly compiled from C/C++. It’s especially good for operating systems designed on modern Intel x86, x86-64, PowerPC, SPARC32, SPARC64, MIPS, ARM, and RISC-V architectures, just to name a few.
20181121/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU
So, you’re wondering about Compact Disc Digital Audio access under virtualization? How do you pack a virtual disc image to include this data? Is this feature even supported? If so, what virtualization solutions support it? This is a must-have feature for virtualizing some 1990s era game software under modern computer hardware.
Unfortunately, the best I can say for this is that virtual machine solutions in general don’t provide support for this. The main support for optical discs that they provide is for data optical discs. The primary and most common example of such data discs that are used is exclusively for booting an operating system installation CD.
Now, if you want to run Audio CDs under virtualization, basically your only option is ATAPI CD drive pass-through. This is a feature that was long either sketchy or unsupported under many solutions until relatively recently. As for the prospect of running a full virtual CD system, well you have to use some lateral thinking and a little bit of custom coding to get that prepped, that’s my best understanding. Let’s start out with this idea. CD drives can also be provided as USB devices. You can code up another virtual machine that acts as software “USB gadget” that plugs into the USB bus of your “host” virtual machine and exposes itself as a “USB CD drive.” Under this premise, the USB CD drive can therefore respond to ATAPI commands and send the digital audio data upon request to the target application.
Still, the question of the file format for storing the data is still at hand. Well, the best answer I have to that is this. Since you’ll need to tool your own software to get anything working, you might as well start by “ripping” the audio CD data off the physical CD and storing it in a typical file format for ripped audio CD data, then take the ISO data CD image and ripped audio files and zip them up into a single ZIP archive.
TODO: Check real USB CD drives on the market and try to verify if they actually do support Audio CDs. If they don’t, then the whole strategy of coding up a virtual solution for this is bummed out.
20181121/DuckDuckGo virtual machine cd digital audio
20181121/DuckDuckGo virtual machine cd digital audio analog
20181121/DuckDuckGo virtual machine audio cd
20181121/https://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/windowsserver/en-US/f275f383-470d-4176-8fdf-d410e4904f75/cant-rip-a-cd-on-virtual-machine
20181121/https://discussions.citrix.com/topic/332997-attempting-to-attach-a-cd-to-a-virtual-machine-so-it-sees-audio-cds/
For a while, VirtualBox did not support ATAPI passthrough for Audio CDs, but now it does.
20181121/https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/3494
Failed search.
20181121/DuckDuckGo virtual ATAPI audio cd vm device
20181121/DuckDuckGo usb audio cd drive