one of my george duke CDs had fallen down and got totally scratched so that most of the tracks could not be played anymore. even high-end NAD cd-players couldn't play it without errors.
now i had a friend who had the same cd at home and was so kind to burn me a copy of it. but after 3 years the copy produces errors again. i looked at the surface and it was indeed a bit scratched but not that much that i would normally be worried. it must be some process of self-corrosion or something. interestingly this is a "storemaster" cd...

i tried all cd-players at home that i have, but none was able to play the cd without errors. some cd-players show errors on most tracks other players only with the last 2 tracks.
so i tried to rip the cd with CDex and with RealAudio, and ripping took half an hour for 2 tracks, but both had problems with the last 2 tracks, although realaudio produced better results, unfortunately errors were still there.

is there a way how to save the music on this cd? are there some more advanced cd-rom drives with better error-correction or better optics that could read this cd without errors?

Try doing a Google search for CD resurfacing. That's how I discovered that there were industrial grade machines (Azuradisc, Fix-A-Disc, Disc Go Pod, etc) for fixing scratched CD's. I found a local game rental store that had one and restored four very scratched CD's to perfect health. They looked like brand new in fact. And it only cost $5 per CD.

Well, to start off, I'd suggest using Exact Audio Copy to rip cds. First id use its Secure mode, but if it cant rip, i would try burst mode.

If it can't rip in burst mode, you could fork out the money to buy a cd resurfacer (or just buy the cd again, if you can, and save the hassle).

I've heard toothpaste can restore cds too, but i havent gotten great results doing that.

There are CD-ROM drives that can rip cds better than others, but if a cd reaches a certain point, for example gets too scratched up, or degrades from poor media, the only feasable option is to get another.

thanks for the tips, i am trying exact audio copy on one of the tracks at the moment and it has been working for a while now, let's see what happens. i will take the cd also to office later to see how it is read in other cd-rom drives.

give a try to RIPTRAX!!

I've had a lot of fun experimenting with scratched CD's recently. Toothpaste should be the white paste type, not gel or anything else like that. Even so, I too have found it didn't work too well. I've also tried plastic cleaner/filler/polish from the automotive department, but that was completely worthless as well. Brasso (and I assume Silvo as well) work fairly decent for light scratches, and cleans pretty good to boot being spirit based and all. If your brave you can try sanding scratches with really fine grit sandpaper(s) and then polishing, but I've found this to be totally hit or miss (you get either fantastic results, or an unreadbale disc if your not careful). I haven't tried a polishing doohickey like Disc Doctor, but have heard (from the local game rental store I mentioned earlier) that it doesn't work very well and makes the disc's milky. The commercial resurfacers are the only way to go for extreme scratches, though even then you may not be 100% succesful. Like I said, discs looked like brand new and they had been in very bad condition after I was through experimenting with them. By the way, the $5 per disc I paid was specifically for audio CD's and was in Canadian currency. Game discs cost slightly more to restore. Let's see, I've also tried using heat from a lighter, but didn't get anywhere with that. The only thing I haven't tried is Turtle Wax, which some people say is really good (and probably less icky than Brasso fumes wise). In all cases, EAC and a good drive are an absolute must.

EAC is pretty useless for recovering errors as would be most programs because all that can be done is the software command the drive to re-read the position a few more times. If the drive can't read the a position on a CD there is little that can be done.

Plextools uses advanced C2 error information & does the as much as possible to recover errors but your best bet is still some kind of surface cleaning.

YEAH IT WORKED!

i used our sony vaio notebook at the office and interestingly this one played the audio-cd nearly without any glitches, so as there was realplayer already installed i used this to rip the tracks and after burning them to cd again there are no errors at all!

i also tried it on another computer with a sony dvd-rw drive but this one was not able to rip the tracks at all, there was mostly silence interrupted by some music

i never thought that there would be such a difference between cd-rom or dvd-rom drives! my drive is not so bad, but the sony-vaio drive (it is a SONY dw-U54A DVD-RW drive) seems to be better!

so thanks for all responses!

best regards, olaf