1. Program to find "dropouts" on (scratched) CD's??

Does anyone think it's possible to write a program to see if an
audio book on CD has "dropouts" on it?

Reason I ask it that I've been getting some books on CD from a library 
for my mother to listen to, & because others have borrowed & returned them
previously, (as opposed to buying each one new), they can be variously
scratched,
which sometimes causes lots of dropouts of the spoken story, which isn't 
wonderful.  

So I thought maybe I could write/find a program that could analyze the CD
as it reads it, looking for dropouts, so if there were I could say,
"never mind, don't bother listening to this one", 
but I can't see how to tell the difference between a dropout and a pause
or moment of silence.

Anybody got any ideas?

(And it could be useful if I could do this to mp3 tracks, too.)

Dan Moyer

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2. Re: Program to find "dropouts" on (scratched) CD's??

Dan Moyer wrote:
> 
> Does anyone think it's possible to write a program to see if an
> audio book on CD has "dropouts" on it?
> 
> Reason I ask it that I've been getting some books on CD from a library 
> for my mother to listen to, & because others have borrowed & returned them
> previously, (as opposed to buying each one new), they can be variously
> scratched,
> which sometimes causes lots of dropouts of the spoken story, which isn't 
> wonderful.  
> 
> So I thought maybe I could write/find a program that could analyze the CD
> as it reads it, looking for dropouts, so if there were I could say,
> "never mind, don't bother listening to this one", 
> but I can't see how to tell the difference between a dropout and a pause
> or moment of silence.
> 
> Anybody got any ideas?
> 
> (And it could be useful if I could do this to mp3 tracks, too.)
> 

Why not just rip and re-burn the CD?  If it does that without error, the newly
burned version should be fine.  If the dropouts are caused by unreadable areas,
then you'll get an error when trying to rip (assuming you don't set your ripper
to ignore read errors)...

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3. Re: Program to find "dropouts" on (scratched) CD's??

Andy Serpa wrote:
> 
> Dan Moyer wrote:
> > 
> > Does anyone think it's possible to write a program to see if an
> > audio book on CD has "dropouts" on it?
> > <snip>
>> > Anybody got any ideas?
> > 
> > (And it could be useful if I could do this to mp3 tracks, too.)
> > 
> 
> Why not just rip and re-burn the CD?  If it does that without error, the newly
> burned version should be fine.  If the dropouts are caused by unreadable
> areas,
> then you'll get an error when trying to rip (assuming you don't set your
> ripper
> to ignore read errors)...

Andy,

Thanks for the suggestion; I'd already done that, and the dropouts seemed 
worse (more) on the ripped/reburned CD than on the original.  But I'll have
to try and check about "ignoring read errors", 'cause the ripping didn't 
indicate any errors at all.  I was just using Windows Media Player to rip.

I also saw a suggestion somewhere on the web to make sure CD player was
set up to do error correction, but couldn't find anywhere on the CD player
properties anything that would set up "error correction for the player.

Was hoping I could write/find/use a program to scan the CDs to see if they
had dropouts, but that might not be doable, I guess.

Dan

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4. Re: Program to find "dropouts" on (scratched) CD's??

Dan Moyer wrote:
> 
> Was hoping I could write/find/use a program to scan the CDs to see if they
> had dropouts, but that might not be doable, I guess.

Hi Dan

The only way I can see you doing this is by using direct CD-DA access to the
drive itself and extracting the error correction information along with the track
data.

Unfortunately I don't know how this is done, and the book to tell you (the Red
Book) costs about $240 USD.

I just did a quick search... Tau Analyzer looks interesting...I don't know if it
will do what you want though.

http://www.softplatz.com/Soft/Audio-Multimedia/Other/Tau-Analyzer.html

Gary

Gary

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5. Re: Program to find "dropouts" on (scratched) CD's??

Hi

If you want to try to recover cds, then 

www.isobuster.com

is the best tool I have found for this - there's a free part (very useful),
and a pay for part, but don't let that put you off.

Chris

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6. Re: Program to find "dropouts" on (scratched) CD's??

ChrisBurch2 wrote:
> 
> Hi
> 
> If you want to try to recover cds, then 
> 
> www.isobuster.com
> 
> is the best tool I have found for this - there's a free part (very useful),
> and a pay for part, but don't let that put you off.
> 
> Chris

Thanks Chris, I'll give it a try!

Dan

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