What do you with a CD you can't even read?  A CD that's not recognised by any player (or PC) you put it in?  Bin material, right?  That's what I thought when a friend presented me with the penultimate CD in an audio book collection.  She'd spent around 15 hours listening to the story-so-far before being stopped dead by an unplayable disc.

Nothing I tried it in would recognise it but out of interest I decided to see what cdparanoia made of it.

Cdparanoia's different from most CD rippers because it focusses on knowing as much as possible about the hardware you're using.  Amongst a lot of other fancy stuff it'll read and repair data from damaged CDs.  It's the brains behind a number of Linux's GUI-based rippers but in this case the GUIs couldn't actually see the disc.

Since cdparanoia reads the audio on a CD as data with no intermediate analog step, I tried it straight from the command line...

cdparanoia --query

...and, hey presto, I got a track listing.  Awesome!

Table of contents (audio tracks only): track length begin copy pre ch =========================================================== 1. 13064 [02:54.14] 0 [00:00.00] no no 2 2. 13576 [03:01.01] 13064 [02:54.14] no no 2 3. 14191 [03:09.16] 26640 [05:55.15] no no 2 ... 19. 13860 [03:04.60] 242494 [53:53.19] no no 2 20. 13277 [02:57.02] 256354 [56:58.04] no no 2 TOTAL 309751 [68:50.01] (audio only)

Next step, to try ripping some tracks.

Cdparanoia has masses of options.  You can rip individual tracks or even parts of them.  If you just wanted to grab the audio from between the times 0:30.12 and 1:10.00 on track 8 you'd enter cdparanoia "8[:30.12]-8[1:10]" That's far more than I needed so I just went for...

cdparanoia -B

...to extract the entire disc and put each track in a separate file.

It took a while—one 5-minute track took more than 5 hours to extract—but it worked! Audio quality seems fine too.

So that's another win for Linux and hero status for your's truly.