Brand New CD not copy protected - Two Tracks will not rip. Any fix?

English Multimedia
#1

I have a brand new 3CD opera and two of the tracks on the last CD will not rip.
I have tried on two different machines with the same result. (Grip/cdparanoia)
The tracks appear to play OK on CD player.
Any solutions available?
Can I return disks as faulty?
Budgie2

#2
  1. try a different ripper I really like gnormalize (though as a kde’er I use Audex)
  2. could there be an issue with the song titles? special characters?
#3

So there is no end to the things companies will do to try to keep you from placing your music on your PC. Now we must assume that you have examined your disk and do not see any finger prints or scratches that need to be attended to. Further, it is a good idea ever so often to blow out the dust from your CD/DVD ROM drive particularly for desktop computers using a can of spray air (what ever that stuff is made from but works really well).

Now, I HIGHLY suggest you install Asunder (from Packman in openSUSE 11.3) and use it to rip your audio CD’s. It just can not be beat. There is no substitute for a quality Audio CD ripper. If you followed all of my suggestions including the use of asunder and it still does not work then you are screwed as best as I can tell.

Thank You,

#4

Hi James,
Many thanks for that. I am trying Asunder as I write this and I see the faulty tracks have been ripped so many many thanks.

I shall also have a look at Audex as suggested by the other reply (for which thanks to the sender as I too use KDE).

Asunder is a bit basic in that there is no provision for composer and other stuff that classical fans need but I can sort out the tagging later. I shall report back how I get on but thanks again.
Budgie2

#5

Hi James,
Many thanks for that. I am trying Asunder as I write this and I see the faulty tracks have been ripped so many many thanks.

I shall also have a look at Audex as suggested by the other reply (for which thanks to the sender as I too use KDE).

Asunder is a bit basic in that there is no provision for composer and other stuff that classical fans need but I can sort out the tagging later. I shall report back how I get on but thanks again.
Budgie2
Good to hear it is working. Asunder is basic, but it just works. I am not sure what else I would want it to do, but then I have long since converted most of my CD’s to MP3 files. Good luck in what ever you decide to do.

Thank You,

#6

Hi James,
Just a quick follow up note. I found that asunder, which worked on my difficult new CD also uses cdparanoia but it must have different settings from those used in Grip. Anyhow all has been fine until now when I had another CD which had three tracks which could not be ripped. I recall somebody had mentioned that KDE came with good multimedia tools and sure enough K3b has ripping capability and can encode with whatever format you want. What is more the ripping parameters are easily changed and when I set retries to 5 I was able to rip the three tracks which had proven impossible with other ripping software.
The K3b interface is very poor but worth the effort because it works. Thought I would post this in case you have any problems, if you are still buying CDs that is!
Regards. Budgie2

#7

You might want to check your CD drive if it’s old. I’ve never had problems ripping new unprotected CDs with grip. It’s only the scratched ones that require lots of retries. A wipe of the CD with cleaning tissue helps too if the CD is dusty or smudged.

#8

Hi James,
Just a quick follow up note. I found that asunder, which worked on my difficult new CD also uses cdparanoia but it must have different settings from those used in Grip. Anyhow all has been fine until now when I had another CD which had three tracks which could not be ripped. I recall somebody had mentioned that KDE came with good multimedia tools and sure enough K3b has ripping capability and can encode with whatever format you want. What is more the ripping parameters are easily changed and when I set retries to 5 I was able to rip the three tracks which had proven impossible with other ripping software.
The K3b interface is very poor but worth the effort because it works. Thought I would post this in case you have any problems, if you are still buying CDs that is!
Regards. Budgie2
Thanks for the update Budgie2. Several people here in the forum will suggest the usage of k3b and I do use it to make my CD’s, but just found Asunder to work more like the way I think, which hopefully is a good thing to say when recommending the usage of Asunder to others. I must say though that I do agree with the assessment of the situation by ken_yap. By that I mean that it is possible your issues relate to some hardware problem with the CD drive and not the disks themselves. I would like to add that I have had to replace CD/DVD drives many times after odd issues have occurred and so far no CD’s I have tried to rip have failed with Asunder. Now unless someone has actually riped every CD there is, it is really hard to say it is not the CD, but such a thing has not yet occurred to me and I have ripped many many CD’s on my rig.

Thank You,

#9

Hi Ken, the CD is brand new and pristine but has been in store for years. I tried cleaning with a fancy CD cleaner but to no avail. I have posted my subsequent experiences. If it were possible to set the number of retires in Grip that would no doubt fix the problem but I don’t know how. Have now switched to K3b where I can set retires and (I believe,) CD speed.

Thanks again,
Budgie2

#10

Hi James,
Your points are well made and understood. I too have had drives fail, sometimes treasured and expensive SCSI drives on my old OS/2 machine and it is possible that the drive now in question is weak but it is in a one year old IBM server and has ripped 7000 tracks since November with only two CDs causing any problem, a total of five tracks.

Like you, I like the Asunder interface and thanks again for suggesting it. I am a great believer in keeping things simple and have only changed again recently to K3b because of further difficulty. I have posted my story in a new post here. If I knew how to tweak things in Asunder I would revert and it is strange because I am sure they all use cdparanoia as the underlying ripper.

If you have any answers to my K3b questions they would be much appreciated.
Thanks again.
Budgie2