Ghostdog, Bit off topic, but for damaged audio CDs give a shot at CDEx w. "Paranoia-Full" read mode. See the software sections.
Ah, but that´s one other advantage with owning a DVD-drive. Two CDs that have sounded terrible on my stereo have worked perfectly in my computer, just ripped one yesterday. On one site they gave some intresting advice for repairing scratched CDs. Wipe the CD with furniture-polish, toothpaste, car wax or furiture wax. Haven´t dared to try
I clean my cd's with a lens cleaning solution that is used for plastic eye glass lenses, and I also use an eye glass lens micro fiber cloth. This method seems to be the safest I've found in the past 5 years. I remember reading many years ago at Winmag.com (when it still existed) about using car wax/polish on cd's and that it would eventually shed off the cd and possibly damage the player lens. I've never tried the car wax method but if I were desperate enough to rip a heavily scratched CD to re-create it I may give it a thought.
Sounds logigal that the car wax may be hazardous. After all the rotation speed of the disc can be very high in a CD-ROM, so the angular velocities are extremely high.
But what if you wipe the disc really carefully? A few years back I had a CD with some crackling sounds on it. A storebought cleaningsolution did the trick.
Personally I think if you had a CD that had issues and you really wanted to rip the songs before you tossed it I wouldn't hesitate to wax it or whatever. I definitely would wipe all the extra wax off but wouldn't worry about it comming off in a CD drive. I doubt it could really do that much damage since the read head doesn't even touch the CD. Plus how much do drives cost these days to replace? Probably not nearly as much as that rare CD eh? Just my 2 cents.
cd-rw, you mentioned something about "full paranoia"-mode in CDex. What´s so different from when ripping normally? How does it work, technically speaking?
CDex > Paranoia Full is considered "secure," and it is a good option to use if EAC cannot grab a track error free. I'll leave the technical stuff to CD-RW.org.
http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/ It comes from the Linux world as open source and the author of CDEx has implemented it to his product. A while ago I recovered a couple of badly damaged CDs and CDex with "Paranoia full" outperformed everything else. EAC jammed on the scratches and ripped the disc for hours. I am not sure how it differs technically form EAC's secure mode (documented at http://www.exactaudiocopy.de ), because full documentation is not available.
The damaged track on the CD had less errors after ripping it with my DVD the when playing it in my stereo, still not pleasent though :-( OK CD-RW, now about Fairy(since I don´t dare to use car wax) Do you just pour the stuff on the CD or do you mix it with water? What do you use to wipe the fairy of the CD? Is there anything else(security stuff?) I should know before it try it?
I don't know what's Fairy, is it something like skip doctor ? http://www.federalstereo.com/skipdoccdscr.html You get dozens of websites in Yahoo.com searching for "CD Scratch repair", but Skip doctor seems very cool, it actually polishes the CD.
Thanks for the tip Pio. I think I´ve seen something like that in stores too. If I´m going to buy a cleaning kit, then I think I´ll go for the ones in stores here in Finland. The Fairy I know, I imagine it´s the same stuff that cd-rw uses(pretty widespread product), is dishwashing detergent(is my english correct?).
Fairy is a dish washing solution (for hand washing, not for washing machines). Dish washing solutions are very good a removing grease and other dirt. The way I do it: -Wash hands (to avoid scratching) -Rinse disc -Apply a little dish washing liquid -Rub gently with fingers, always from the center to the border. -Rinse -Dry
Thanks for the "Paranoia"-tip CD-RW. The track came out just excelent. I mixed some dish-washing solution with water and stuck it in a old CD-cleaning spray-bottle. That combined with the DVD-drives read-mechanism and CDex did the trick.
