Help with a damaged CDR

i've got a rare mira calix dj set from the warp website back when it had a puzzle page and certain pieces would pop out and had DJ sets. There were some real gems in there, another one being a Broadcast DJ set which I have lost over time.

I burned the Mira Calix set to a CDR which I found but am having trouble with it. I burned it as an audio CD. I try to rip it and it rips incredibly slow (.3x) and comes out with fuzz/static through the whole thing. The CD itself doesn't look terribly scratched or damaged. I've tried several ripping tools but I get the same result on all.

I am using a generic Blu Ray reader to rip from.

Any tips on how I may be able to clean the disc or rip differently to try and get a good listenable copy ? Would like to share here

2 hur-durish Qs off the bat but

Does your drive rip normal, commercial CDs okay?

Does Mira Calix CDR play okay on a standalone CD player, on your computer, etc?

Has EAC been one of the tools you tried? If not I'd suggest ripping test & copy in burst mode and in secure mode and see if you have any luck with either.

Also, going from what I can only assume are some lowish bitrate circa 2K mp3s to CDR and back again will introduce a generation loss, unless you keep the rip as wav or encode to lossless like flac. At that point it's probably more worthwhile to track down the "master" originally available file in the ether, I wouldn't be surprised if it exists somewhere in the infosphere

  On 4/24/2016 at 5:36 AM, Bob Dobalina said:

2 hur-durish Qs off the bat but

 

Does your drive rip normal, commercial CDs okay?

Does Mira Calix CDR play okay on a standalone CD player, on your computer, etc?

 

Has EAC been one of the tools you tried? If not I'd suggest ripping test & copy in burst mode and in secure mode and see if you have any luck with either.

 

Also, going from what I can only assume are some lowish bitrate circa 2K mp3s to CDR and back again will introduce a generation loss, unless you keep the rip as wav or encode to lossless like flac. At that point it's probably more worthwhile to track down the "master" originally available file in the ether, I wouldn't be surprised if it exists somewhere in the infosphere

good questions, in my derpyness i have not tested other CDs yet. I can tell you I can't get it to play at all though, it just stalls out in whatever audio player I try to use.

My google-fu is pretty advanced and I haven't been able to turn up the original (wish i could find them all - there was a calix, gescom, broadcast, clark, and some others) yet....

I'll run some tests and report back. I did try EAC and I ended up with a blank audio file the length of the set. I then used dBpoweramp and was able to get the fuzz-laiden copy. tried some noise reduction tools which didn't work at all.

Do you think it's worthwhile to clean the CD using any special techniques ?

Sorry man, I think if you've got an unplayable CD then generally you're shit out of luck

I'm surprised that no one in the early idm nerdosphere saved these for posterity, you've piqued my interest in what dese mixes are all about, want hear. Maybe you could post a "wanted" thread in the watmmixes sub-forum, I wouldn't be surprised if some old codger on here has them, we can hope

Some CD-Rs are just low quality and degrade over time, no matter the care or if there visible scratches. I know some CD ripping software (can't remember which in particular) claimed to rip slowly/repeatedly until it got audio that wasn't damaged, but that was meant to deal with scratched CDs...could still be an option.

I was able to salvage a Gescom CDr today. I tried washing with dishsoap and distilled water, no go.....tried toothpaste, asanine idea....finally took it over to a newer blu ray burner and pulled it with zero issues. Went ahead and grabbed an LG blu ray burner but having trouble getting it to work correctly on my macbook. Will see. But in any case it looks like a better drive helped, and ive been using dbpoweramp and eac i think...

ha unrelated but you reminded me I burnt some of my own tracks to cd-r once or twice. might be some stuff that didn't make it transitioning between laptops

  On 8/5/2016 at 8:02 PM, Ragnar said:

ha unrelated but you reminded me I burnt some of my own tracks to cd-r once or twice. might be some stuff that didn't make it transitioning between laptops

nice. yeah im about to go through all these unlabeled spindles that have been here for almost 2 decades....hopefully i find some good stuff, probably loads of crap compilations though :)

It might also be due to a 'thin' CDR, where the aluminum coating is very thin, and the laser actually partially passes through. You might try putting a label on the CDR and see if that helps any (if that is the case).

Sure ill keep that in mind. The Calix and Gescom did have labels, the Calix was just too scratched up to read accurately from it.

Maybe I'll give it a shot in one of these new blu ray players and see what happens though. It would be good to use some kind of polish perhaps..

One of my cdrs I managed to resurrect by duplicating the disc with Nero (probably will work with most cd writing software). It took like two hours but eventually I got a new working clone out of it!

Already mentioned here but, in my experience yeah, when a disc is really bad it helps more to try a different drive than to try different software. On occasion I’ve brought CDs in to work to rip on the crappy tray-loading drive on the old work computer I had (which would otherwise not rip on my iMac).

Yeah i've found that loads of CDs won't read on the slot-load DVDRW drive on the macbook but if I attach an LG Blu Ray Writer it does fine. Perhaps just better/more efficient mechanics over time. It does bother me now though that I can't find the Calix CD. It's got to be somewhere on the net, maybe i'll check tonight if I can find that and the Broadcast set...I still have the tracklist for that one. Lots of United States Of America which was a cool ass Psychedelic rock group from SF late 60s.