I’m new to this “ripping” and “synching” of CD’s and have run into a problem. I’m ripping audiobooks to put on my Sandisk Clip and I finally partially succeeded in synching my first book. But I couldn’t rip one track on 3 different CD’s because of a small scratch in each one of them. I tried to copy the CD onto my hard drive and then rip the copy, but it wouldn’t copy the defective tracks to my hard drive, either. But if I play the book on the CD drive, the tracks are read without a hiccup. How can I get around the problem of not being able to rip those tracks?
When you “play” a CD, whether it be music or audiobook, your CD drive is spinning at waht I would call “normal” speed and can probably, thanks to over-sampling, etc. handle the scratch or defect on the CD itself.
But when you “rip” a CD, your drive is spinning at a very high rpm, hence the term “rip”. The laser inside is trying to copy all the information on the CD while it’s going around at the speed of light! It’s like counting the cars in the Indy 500. While they’re on the pace lap it’s easy, but wait till that green flag drops and Oh Boy, Look out! Now just try to count these same cars as they’re whizzing past your face at 190 mph! You’re going to miss some, or at least some of the details about each car.
You might try some different software (Winamp, Media Monkey, etc.), but I think if the CD(s) are actually scratched to this degree (and not just some schmutz on them) then you may be SOL [Something Outta Luck]
EDIT: If you can find some software to “record” directly from your CD drive while you’re playing it, then you could convert it (if necessary) to .mp3 format. I was just trying to get Audacity to do it, but couldn’t. I know I can make audio recordings with a microphone and save them and either .wav or .mp3 but I couldn’t figure out how to get it to record from the CD drive.
Actually, when you are listening to the CD the player can come to some corrupted data, skip it, and do the best it can without it. And you may not even notice in the music. When you are ripping the CD, the drive tries to read it all and if it can’t, can enter into and endless loop.
Try Isobuster (www.isobuster.com). This software can handle better the reading of scratched CDs. And if you say you can ‘listen’ to the CD without problem, there is a good chance that it will work. It’s shareware (or trialware, I’m not sure) but the free features should be enough.
I’ve found a program that you can use to rip, or in this case record (analog) the cd tracks and you can set it to automatically encode to wave,mp3,wma, or even ogg vorbis. It’s called audiograbber, used to be shareware, now it’s freeware, and available at http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/ To be frank, I’d never tried it until today, but just got through recording 2 tracks of an audiobook and it really works! Be sure to choose “analog” under settings, and uncheck the “mute speakers while ripping” box. It’s not the easiest interface, but once you’ve done a couple of tracks it should be no problem. By the way, audiograbber will also tag the mp3 (or ogg or wma) using freedb. For general ripping of non-scratched cds, I’ve been using and prefer CDex, another freeware available at Best Open Source Mac CD Ripping Software 2022 , I use version 1.70 beta on my winxp mce2005 pc. One really nice feature of CDex is that when it rips a cd you will know if there are any errors found during the rip, it actually counts them for you and lists them under “status”. If no errors are encountered, the status simply shows “ok”. My first mp3 player was a Rio 600 back in 1999, $100 for 64mb of memory, and it was about the size of a deck of cards, we’ve come a long way since then, huh? Good luck with the rip.
