Techniques to cope with bronzing?

[Adlopa]

A handful of my CDs have bronzed and tracks nearer the edge won't rip without hundreds of re-ripped frames – I've cancelled the rips before completion.

Before I set them up on another on another computer to just sit and churn through for however long it takes, is there anything in Settings I should know about to optimise ripping for these degrading discs?

I'm using external USB drives, which identify as Matshita - DVD-RAM UJ870QJ, HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GP60NB60 and Philips - CDRW/DVD SCB5265, if that makes any difference.

[Spoon]

Re: Techniques to cope with bronzing?

Not much you can do, either the drives will read the disc or will not.

[GBrown]

Re: Techniques to cope with bronzing?

A handful of my CDs have bronzed and tracks nearer the edge won't rip without hundreds of re-ripped frames – I've cancelled the rips before completion.

Before I set them up on another on another computer to just sit and churn through for however long it takes, is there anything in Settings I should know about to optimise ripping for these degrading discs?

I'm using external USB drives, which identify as Matshita - DVD-RAM UJ870QJ, HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GP60NB60 and Philips - CDRW/DVD SCB5265, if that makes any difference.

I've tried everything including polishes and creams, black markers, Windex, and witchcraft to bring these back to life, just for one more rip. No luck for me. I have resorted to picking up used copies of the same recording when I could find them.

[schmidj]

Re: Techniques to cope with bronzing?

Certainly, looking for a used copy is probably your best bet. But you shouldn't be afraid of rerips, as long as you listen to the results afterwards. I recently acquired (for free) a box of a lot of old but interesting CDs which I'm ripping. Stuff I'll enjoy, but would never spend the money to purchase new, or for that matter probably buy a replacement of if it won't rip. The down side is these CDs were badly mistreated, most have no jewel boxes (or artwork) and many are scratched to heck. But I rip them with secure ripping with (I recall) 200 rerip tries allowed. When it rerips a lot, the end result is often a mismatch to the accurate rip database. But I've ripped quite a number of CDs where some tracks had hundreds (upward of 1000) rerips and for almost all of them, the ripped audio, while not bit accurate, sounded fine to my ear, I couldn't hear the errors.

Even on the couple of tracks which had audible glitches, the glitch wasn't bad enough to make me delete the track. If the CD was awful, I'd have dumped it in the trash.

That's not to say that I haven't run into CDs that were unripable, with repeated clicks, skips and dropouts. Most commonly on CDRs that were apparently defectively burnt. The only answer then was to can it and get another copy if I could.

One other hint, get an assortment of drives to use, different drives respond very differently to bad discs. You might find a drive that will rip the whole CD bit perfect, or a drive that won't read the CD at all. In general, I find that "internal" drives in general do much better than portable "external" drives or the built in drives in laptops I connect the drives with a SATA/IDE to USB adapter to a USB port on the computer. A very small sample seems to indicate that DVD drives do better than BluRay drives.

Good luck, keep trying and you may get a good, or at least listenable rip yet.