Cracked audio CD. Any hope?

[bgowland]

I've just been chatting with a friend of mine who has discovered a crack in a favourite CD which runs from the spindle hole out to about three-quarters of the radius of the disc. The CD is no longer in production and (being a non-techie) he never ripped the contents to his PC.

Not surprisingly, his CD player and PC CD-ROM drive refuse to acknowledge that there's a disk in the drive if he tries to play it, but what he was wondering was if there is any software that might read a CD at the image level to try to piece together at least some of the content.

I've never heard of anything and it seems unlikely but I thought I'd throw this into the arena to see if anyone knows of anything.

Cheers,
Brian

[groover km]

I don't know of anything; and to be honest, I'd be very wary of putting a cracked CD in any drive (did you see the episode of Mythbusters where they shattered CDs? Not the sort of shrapnel you want flying round the inside of your machine.

At the risk of being obvious, even for something that is long out of press, have you considered emule? You can find some old, obscure, long lost love's on there, so long as you don't mind waiting a while (sometimes a big while) for them to download.*

*So I'm told...

[JonnyCam]

If you are going to try and recover the CD using the PC - I would suggest you try and find a very old CD drive (like a 4x drive or similar)

Reduce the chance it will explode. You might be the able to recover the cd info using "CD Check" ( http://www.kvipu.com/CDCheck/ )
I've used it recover audio CD's - but the CD check website says that it can be used for that. (the prog is freeware too)

Thanks

[HtV]

If you have NERO you could also use Drivespeed (I think it is called) to limit the drive speed to e.g 1x or 2x. Good luck.
btw, I would go for Emule aswell

[K.S.]

you might try using EAC http://www.exactaudiocopy.de using 1x or 2x speed or just give linux & dd a try (i'm indeed not sure how to reduce drivespeed under linux, try googleing that ) ... whatever you try afterwards with that image at least reduces all riscs of blowing up your drive

[bgowland]

Thanks for all the replies folks. It's not the end of the world for my mate - I think he'd resigned himself to monitoring eBay for a replacement (where he got it in the first place).

My concerns were with extending the crack right across the disc (although I know the drive speed can be controlled programatically) but also that the crack is likely to throw the laser tracking off which might make it impossible to read anyway.

I'll take a look at the various bits of software that have been suggested and if I have time I might have a play around - chances are he might find a replacement on eBay before I get around to it though. I'll also mention eMule to him.

Cheers,
Brian

[martint123]

I have a feeling that if the drive reports 'no cd present' then that's as far as you can get with a retail drive.