Alcohol 52% is a CD and DVD imaging and emulation program for Windows. It saves physical discs as image files and mounts those files in virtual optical drives, allowing disc-based software and media to be accessed without keeping the original disc in a drive. Its tools concentrate on reading discs and using their images; CD and DVD burning belongs to Alcohol 120%.
Reading discs into image files
The Image Making Wizard reads a CD or DVD from a selected optical drive and saves its contents as an image on local storage. You choose the reading speed, destination folder, image name and output format. Alcohol 52% uses MDS as its default image format, with other supported formats available in the wizard.
A disc’s data type determines how it should be read. Selecting a data-type preset adjusts the reading options together, while the Data-Type Analyzer can examine the inserted disc to help identify the appropriate selection.
More detailed controls govern reading errors and additional disc information. You can set reading retries, enable error skipping or read sub-channel data where the selected disc type calls for it. Data Position Measurement captures the irregular placement of data used by certain disc protections so that Alcohol can emulate that information when the image is mounted. These controls depend on the source disc and the capabilities of the physical drive.
Virtual drives
Mounting an image makes it available through a virtual CD/DVD-ROM drive, much like inserting a disc into a physical reader. Alcohol 52% can work with existing images as well as ones created by its own wizard. Supported image associations include ISO, MDS, CCD, CUE, CDI and NRG, so a collection does not have to consist of a single image format.
The full edition supports up to 31 virtual drives. Each can hold a different image, allowing several discs to remain mounted at once. You can change a virtual drive’s letter and enable automatic remounting of images after a restart. Double-click mounting can assign an image to the first available virtual drive.
Unmounting removes an image from its virtual drive. Alcohol also separates ejecting from unmounting: an ejected image remains assigned to the device and can be loaded again. This distinction supports software that uses disc-eject and disc-load commands during operation.
Image library
Existing images can be added to Alcohol 52%’s image list, while Image Finder searches selected locations or devices for particular image-file types.
The image list can also be exported as an FLS file and imported later. The saved list groups references to image files; mounting still uses the underlying images stored on disk.
Disc inspection
DVD/CD Manager shows information about physical drives and inserted media. Its separate views cover drive details, supported disc-reading and writing capabilities, disc contents and media information such as the manufacturer.
For closer inspection, selecting a track opens the Sector Viewer. This exposes disc data at a lower level than the image list, alongside the track information used to navigate the inserted disc.
Alcohol 52% editions and Alcohol 120%
Alcohol 52% is available as a paid edition, a time-limited trial and a Free Edition for non-business use. The trial restricts the number of virtual drives. Alcohol 120% adds physical-disc burning, copying and erasing, plus image creation from ordinary files on the hard drive.
