I'm trying to repair an old damaged CD-R audio cd (no scratches). The resulting waveform contains many gaps (5ms-100ms) due to read errors. Anyone know a good method/software to automatically detect and remove(cut!) such gaps? I tried auditon and soundforge standard tools but couldn't get any satisfying results.

There is a tool called "deglitch" by Bryant (the wavpack-dev). But i'm not sure if it would be useful in your case, because its mostly meant for scratched CDs.

- Lyx

Found only 16 Gaps... not enough.
The gaps are all over the wave around 3 per second and have DC offsets.

Here's a pic showing the gaps:

Ouch, that looks evil. Are those dropouts(missing data) or gaps(added silence)?

If its dropouts, then it is probably impossible to repair - 3seconds is way too much lost data to interpolate it to a listenable state.

- Lyx

Hi NoX1911, your first tactic should be to attempt re-ripping that track with alternate model CD (or DVD) drives. I once had an old CD rip that displayed almost identical "drop-out" issues to the one you posted on several tracks. After spending over 3 hours in a wave editor fixing just one track (and not fully satisfactorily at that) I decided to try re-ripping it in another computer. Bingo, came out perfect.

Different model drives often have very different capabilities at digital audio extraction, so go pester all your freinds and try ripping it on their computers until you find one that does the trick.

As mentioned try different drives for ripping and also different software too (isobuster is quite good i believe but is obviously not 100% accurate -but then in these circumstances its probably not a big deal)

@Lyx:
Dropouts aren't 3secs, 100ms maybe.. I wouldn't even try then..

I tested 3 drives already with nearly same results... i don't think i will find a significantly better drive (these cds are physically damaged, rest some years in my car, sunlight exposed and such ). EAC safe extract modes fail to extract on every drive (needs 10 years or so ), so i used burst mode that resulted in drop outs.
But... then i tried isobuster (thx Rotellian), it allows to 'omit bad sectors'. It sounds funny sometimes (speed ups) but its much better than the previous drop outs. That's what i tried to achieve with post-processing.

Edit: Doesn't work with all cds/tracks.. some sound better, some still have the same drop outs even with isobuster.