Unredeemable CDs?

Those of you who use dBpoweramp for CD backup. Have you ever had CDs that are just unrippable? I'm ripping a few I discovered hiding in a bin from a few years ago that I never even knew I had. I must not have taken good care of them because some are telling me they have to re-rip thousands of frames. I think I had one that said it had to do 12,000 frames. Is there any way to get around this? EAC pretty much slows to a halt if I try that instead.

 

I have just ripped all my CDs to my NAS. Offical CDs were fine but most of the home burnt CDs failed to load.

 

i'm wondering if i shouldn't get a skip doctor. i'm ripping some cds for a friend of mine and most of them are getting tons of frames needing to be re-read even on different drives and between dbpoweramp and EAC.

 

Obviously wash the CD in case dust or fingerprints present. Did you try ripping at slower speed?

Bring the drive down to 4x or even 2x and see if it's better...

Usually works for me with older CDs that I have trouble with.

 

I struggled to rip the CD side of the one Dualdisc I have (Living Colour's Collideoscope) across maybe 4 optical drives across three computers due to multiple errors. I gave up and captured the optical out from a CD player on MacBook using Audacity.

Since then I have upgraded PCs and got a perfect rip first time using an LG external drive. Loads of effort for one album I don't even like that much...

 

The only ones I found to be unredeemable were made in the UK by PDO. Oh, and a Roxy Music disc that had been cleaned on one of those disc cleaners. I gave that one back to the store.

 

I have maybe one or two. One is an original Gene Ammons Boss Tenor CD. I can't remember the other. They were used CDs I had just bought so I got a refund on them (they weren't playing anywhere else, obviously). I never damaged a CD so badly myself.

But I think my generic CD drive in my entry-level HP computer is simply not appropriate for the job. When it spends too long trying to reread frames, it freezes. With a better drive I guess I could have made a copy

 

I use Accurateip for both XLD and DbPoweramp They will automatically go into Secure/Ultrasecure mode. If they go in to have to try fix thousands of frames that can take a painfully long time and be very hard on the drive. You can run Burst mode and that will generally rip through most anything but no telling how manny errors or how accurate. And the last resort good old iTunes which with even Error Correction on will rip most anything on earth.

 

Try burst mode, I have a few discs that don't match 'accurate rip' I use two different drives and between the both I can usually match, I have one cd that fails but sounds fine, I've had to replace only one disc because it was actually defective, but if you have audible errors/skips you may have to re-purchase a clean one

 

For some reason my computer hated Queens Of The Stone Age's Songs For The Deaf.

Had two copies that it wouldn't recognize. Eventually I took it to work, burned a CD copy that my computer read straight away.

Dumb Machines.

 

2002 was about the time Europe was throwing that stupid CC on a few releases, I have a few where my internal would not read/rip, external worked fine

 

There are some discs I've encountered which are clean but just unreadable without errors on any drive. Even across multiple copies. Just how it is, but luckily those are rare cases.


Also watch out for those UK PDO pressings from the late 80's. The audio tracks on my PDO CD Videos still play, although just barely. They won't last long. Luckily I've already ripped them. The video tracks have already gone.

 

What's interesting is that if I fire up my Linux Mint build and run them through Audex, they rip fine -- no errors, no skipping on the ripped tracks. I wonder if Linux throws a different reading scheme at them or something which just happens to work.

 

I have a few of them.

David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust R32P-1037 (impossible to rip with both EAC and XLD. iTunes does rip it, but with crackling noise)
David Bowie - Young Americans R32P-1038 (A few songs rip accurately, others do not, but at least I was able to rip it)

I also have first Japan jazz CD pressings that cannot rip. IIRC, all of them are from the VDJ series

 

All my cds are in immaculate condition and I still have some that are trouble, although I have never found one that wouldn't rip.

 

This is the way to go, as long as the disc plays & you have the capture hardware.
Stealth copy control very occasionaly raises it's head when ripping second-hand CD's (not mentioned anywhere on the sleeve or disc). This will guarantee a copy on your hard drive