If you've got Dido's rather good album "Life For Rent", you may be annoyed to discover that it won't play from your PC CD-ROM drive. The disc includes a program to play it securely on Windows, but that doesn't help us Linux or Mac schmucks. But fear not!
This page describes how to extract the tracks from a copy-protected disc. It presumes that you have a copy of the cdparanoia program to hand (ideally, built from source), and that you've checked that you can use it to extract tracks from regular CDs.
Enjoy the music! You might like to email the artist / music company and tell them that you've managed to play the music despite the damage they did to the disc. But if they keep making it awkward to play the music, they ought to consider how much more likely people are to give up buying the disc and just download it.
And rip, don't rip off, the album. There's no reason to fuel the music industry paranoia about playing music on PCs. Use the ripped tracks only for your own reasonable personal use, as per the existing (and perfectly adequate) copyright laws.
This works for:
To extract tracks 1-10 from a protected music disc in your main CD ROM drive:
cdparanoia -d /dev/cdrom -Y -v --output-wav --batch --force-read-speed 1 1-10
This dumps the tracks in the current directory in WAV file format under the names track01.cdda.wav etc. It forces the CD ROM drive to read at single speed, hopefully reducing the number of retries that the software will make in reading tracks with copy-protect noise. It also instructs (with the -Y flag) the program to ignore normal errors as far as possible. Obviously, if your protected disc is also scratched then you're fairly screwed. :-)
If you're using a different CD ROM drive then change the argument to -d appropriately; for my SCSI CD ROM drive I use -d /dev/scd0 for example.
Play each track in turn with:
play track01.cdda.wavto ensure that it's free of artefacts.
Now you can record a CD-R with these tracks, essentially producing a duplicate of the original disc but without the corrupting noise; ironically, you have produced a proper CD from an incorrectly formatted disc. Insert a blank CD-R into your CD recorder drive (assumed to be a SCSI drive with ID 3) and type:
cdrecord -v speed=2 dev=0,3,0 -audio -pad track*.wav??
This command records at 2x speed; you can adjust this to 4x speed or greater if your CD writer supports it. You need to change the 0,3,0 to 0,X,0 where X is the SCSI ID of your CD writer.
This should produce an audio CD that will play in any CD-ROM drive, computer-based or otherwise. You can then rip from the CD in your own time with your usual software.
This is needed for:
You may find that track 1, despite being an audio track, is marked as data. cdparanoia won't rip this track. You can force it to do so, but you need to modify the source - download and extract the source from xiph.org first.
In file main.c change the following lines:
1012: report("Selected span contains non audio tracks. Aborting.\n\n");
1013 exit(1);
to:
1012: report("Warning: selected span contains non audio tracks.\n\n");
1013 /*exit(1)*/;
Re-make and re-install the program. Now re-run your normal cdparanoia command line, instructing it to retrieve all the tracks you want including the audio track. It will still warn you that you're extracting a digital track, but it should extract it without any problems.
Jan Brunner writes:
I recently tried to rip CDs in Linux for the first time and found out that the results are not convincing at all with some badly scratched CDs one can buy in the stores these days. I then found your site and used your patch for cdparanoia to read the audio tracks that were somehow marked as data tracks by the scratches...
Then I found an even more scratched CD that managed to have a wrong TOC: lots of 10 seconds tracks and several tracks combined in one, depending on when I inserted the CD. I was of course not satisfied and searched for further methods.
I then found an interesting post to the German Suse mailing list:
The interesting part is this command (all in one line):
cdrecord -setdropts -force driveropts=singlesession dev=/dev/cdroms/cdrom1
The program seems to complain because I specified the device by the device name but it worked and I don't know how to do it otherwise. It forces the drive to ignore all sessions but the first and strangely, the bad TOC scratches seem to only be in the later sessions on all CDs I tried... ;)
This trick only works with CD writers as far as I know. Normal readers don't have the necessary interface.
Perhaps you'd like to try this trick out and post it to your page. I sure hope that the labels will stop releasing these scratched CDs...
Posted as requested -- thanks Jan! Adi