How to get "best effort" at ripping defective CD?

[huge]

I have an old self-burned CD-R that dBpoweramp can't rip without errors. It contains 3 very long tracks that I created - I can't go out and find a healthy copy of the CD to replace it - and I don't have a backup. The disc is not scratched, presumably it's just old and degrading.

If I rip in burst mode, a quick listen sounds OK, but the tracks are 25 minutes long so I haven't carefully listened all the way through. I guess that's another question: I can't tell from dB's log where the errors occurred, so I can't scan to listen to them (I remember this was pretty obvious with EAC). How can I find out where in the track a ripping error occurred?

Once I figure out where the errors are and how bad they are, what can I do to try to heal them? Again, I used to use EAC, which has glitch correction (which was hit-or-miss ... sometimes it seemed to work pretty well, and other times didn't do any good at all).

Any advice would be most appreciated...

[Spoon]

Re: How to get "best effort" at ripping defective CD?

To look at positions, rip in secure mode outputting a log set to to the complete option.

[Porcus]

Re: How to get "best effort" at ripping defective CD?

I used to use EAC, which has glitch correction (which was hit-or-miss ... sometimes it seemed to work pretty well, and other times didn't do any good at all).

dBpoweramp also has an interpolation function. However, unless Spoon has made some radical improvements in version 14, you are probably better off without using it (it sucks, to be frank).

I assume that this is a piece of music where you are willing to spend some time to get it out properly. A solution could be the following:

- Rip it using a few fairly good programs: dBpoweramp and EAC are the obvious choices, but also try http://www.cuetools.net/wiki/CUERipper . Use the most secure settings with each application (for dBpoweramp, the most secure settings might cause rip to abort if the CD is very damaged though).

- Use an audio compare function to check if they are bit-identical. If they are, then well, fine (edit: not necessarily, but if there is an error which is read consistently the same way, then you have to deal with it -- if you are more paranoid at this stage, try different drives as well, see next point). If they are not, then note where the differences are (I am using the foobar2000 media player with this plugin: http://www.foobar2000.org/components...foo_bitcompare , which reports start/end/peak of differences -- it only does pairwise comparison though.)

- Assume there are differences: Try to use different drives. They might read differently. In my experience, single-track errors from my (purchased) CDs had more than 50/50 chance of getting out right after having tried two other drives (one of which, though, is the PX-230A ... the reason for not using that in the first place, was that ripped with a 200 disc changer).

- Now you have a set of different files, which are basically identical except for a few frames where you have no idea which one is better. But if you have written down where the differences are, you have a starting point for deciding which file to start working on, and listening to find the least bothersome glitches.

- Audible artifacts can of course not be truly corrected, only smoothened out. I guess that you are better off asking on hydrogenaudio about which software to use (Audacity's click removal feature comes to mind).