So, in DOSBox games I know that GOG use a disc image file with a cuesheet for the audio tracks that point to .ogg music files. This is because DOSBox has the functionality to use CD images. However, what do GOG do for Windows based games that use CD audio tracks?

I may be wrong but I think Windows based games use a variety of methods for reading/playing music. Sometimes music is in music files, other times music is contained within very large "data" files.

Those types of games are indicative of games that stored the music as files anyway. I'm specifically looking at games that use CD audio tracks. I think Total Annihilation is an example (though it is a GOG game I don't have yet). I was wondering whether GOG get the music present in a similar way to how they do with DOSBox, but I'm not aware of any portable virtual disc image mounting applications.

Well, in Total Annihilation, it looks like GOG ripped the music into MP3 files and caused the game to look in the music folder instead of reading music from the discs....the ingame option still says CD Music, but it plays MP3's.

I wonder how they did that.

Magic! ;)

From what I gather they replaced calls to winmm.dll to a custom-made DLL named win32.dll that plays audio files when asked to play CD audio.

So it would be different methods for different games then.

I think every game on GOG has its music unless there were some licensing problems and the music had to be cut out. But for all games I have, the music is there and plays like a charm.

I don't miss CD music era. I almost forgot how buzzing of a CD ROM sounds like.

Me neither. I always found it funny how the music back then took up several times the space the actual games did. Music compression FTW!

I mostly don't miss that few seconds a game froze because CD ROM had to spin up a cd to play some 15 second track...

See, this is what I'm trying to myself. Get some old games I have running without me needing to use my old CDs, and without losing the music. I don't really want to have to create a disc image and have a virtual CD playing, nor do I want to have a music player running in the background. Some games you can just put music files within the game folders and they'll play, others aren't so nice.

In that case I think you'll be fine using a program like Alcohol 52% ([url=http://www.free-downloads.net/programs/Alcohol_52__Free_Edition?__utma=1.1286920216.1355604703.1355604703.1355604703.1&__utmb=1.4.10.1355604703&__utmc=1&__utmx=-&__utmz=1.1355604703.1.1.utmcsr=google|utmccn=(organic)|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=(not%20provided)&__utmv=-&__utmk=191731882]free download here[/url]) to make an image of your game CD and run it from there.

However the game reads the music on disc, it should take care of itself. Unless you are talking about games which have a separate disc with music tracks. I can't think of too many games that did that, aside from a few first person shooters that allowed you to put in any CD and listen to it while you played the game.

I don't want to create my own CDs either. The whole objective is to get away from using CDs at all, and not relying on other installed software to be running the music for me. See, DOSBox runs the game and the music via cuesheet images, and as DOSBox is portable, GOG bundle it with their DOS games, so it is all one nice package.

Just for reference, the game I'm trying to do this with at the moment is Carmageddon 2. I have the CD tracks ripped to mp3 file, now I just want to get them playing in the game. It is looking like I may have to go with running a music player in the background, which isn't ideal.