Fred Smith fredex@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wodim is a defective variant from an extremely outdated cdrecord (taken from a cdrecord from September 2004).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 Eißfeld 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.
Jörg