CentOS - Apr 2013 - trying to recover an audio CD...

I'm trying to recover data from an audio cd. it is a recording of a live
session, made on a professional cd recorder, on the fly. 

apparently, instead of stopping it and fixating the disc, someone turned
off the power. oops.

I know that wodim will fixate a disk as long as it was otherwise properly 
terminated (I've done it more than once), but this one it won't fixate. 
depending on the drive I try it in, I get different messages, but in
either case, it remains unfixated.

so i've tried reading it with cdparanoia, but it can't do anything with
it, or not that I've figured out how to do.

So, can anyone suggest ways to try to recover this audio data?

thanks!
-- 
---- Fred Smith -- fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us ----------------------------
                    Do you not know? Have you not heard? 
    The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. 
  He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.
----------------------------- Isaiah 40:28 (niv) -----------------------------

Fred Smith <fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us> wrote:
> I'm trying to recover data from an audio cd. it is a recording of a
live
> session, made on a professional cd recorder, on the fly. 
Do you have any working CD from that drive? If yes, you could call:

	cdrecord -minfo

to get the state and to find out whether it writes in TAO mode. (-minfo is a 
shortcut for -media-info).
> apparently, instead of stopping it and fixating the disc, someone turned
> off the power. oops.
>
> I know that wodim will fixate a disk as long as it was otherwise properly 
> terminated (I've done it more than once), but this one it won't
fixate.
> depending on the drive I try it in, I get different messages, but in
> either case, it remains unfixated.
wodim is a defective variant from an extremely outdated cdrecord (taken from a 
cdrecord from September 2004). 

-	Did you try the original software?

-	Is it possible to use the original drive that was used for writing?

> so i've tried reading it with cdparanoia, but it can't do anything
with
> it, or not that I've figured out how to do.
cdparanoia is a patch on a cdda2wav version from 1997. There was never an 
update on the cdda2wav code and development stopped in 2001. Don't expect 
cdparanoia to be able to read such disks, as the _read_ properties in 
cdparanoia are generally bad compared to a recent cdda2wav.

Note that after the development for cdparanoia stopped around 2000/2001, Heiko 
Ei?feld and I took the "paranoia code" (the code in cdparanoia above
the read
layer that is responsible for retries and result rating) out of cdparanoia, 
made a portable library from it and added it to cdda2wav.

Your problem is that cdparanoia will never read a TOC-less disk and that the 
dead fork from a September 2004 cddda2wav called "icedax" is full of
bugs.

The real cdda2wav has a compile option to set up a virtual TOC, but if you ever 
like to read a CD without a TOC, you not only need to tell cdda2wav the TOC by 
exiting the compiled in TOC, but you also need to kill any hostile software on 
your computer that tries to access CDs in an unapropriate way, such as
"hald" or
it's successors. Once such a program did try to access a problematic CD, you
will never be able to access the CD unless you reload it - which will result in 
a new access attempt :-(

If the CD has a PMA (which I expect from writing in TAO mode), the disk should 
be readable by cdda2wav if you use a drive that understands the PMA.

J?rg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) J?rg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js at cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)  
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog:
http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily