Hi,

I was wondering if it would be possible to repair the reflective top layer of a cd-recordable?

Right now there are some small holes in that layer that are most obvious if you hold the cd against the light and EAC is unable to read these parts on the cd (it also skips in a regular player).

All I want to accomplish is rip it without any skips, I am not worried about an accurate rip in this case.

Is it possible?

Admittedly, I'm no EAC expert -- but can't you use burst mode?

Unfortunately the data is stored immediately below that reflective layer. If the reflective layer is gone in those spots then it's overwhelmingly likely that the data is gone too.

No, unfortunately, not. Label side damage is unrepairable and destroys data. You can repair the damage to the bottom with CD repair kits like the AutoMax.

Oke thanks.

Too bad though

Someone once mentioned here that dabbing label-side damage with a reflective ink (such as those solder-trace ink pens?*) sometimes temporarily increases reflectivity enough to help a bit with the rip. But my opinion is that such an approach is risky, as the solvent is likely to further degrade the layer.

This assumes that the holes were caused by damage to the label side, and not due to manufacturing defects or layer-rot.

-brendan

* to clarify, the pens that contain a reflective ink made for repairing board-traces, not "pen-type" solder irons, of course!

...and because of this I have a hard time believing that reflective ink is going to magically fix the pits and lands that have been scratched through.

Luckily, audio CDs have two layers of redundancy so a scratch through the metallic layer isn't necessarily going to result in errors that can't be recovered.

The only argument I have with this is as follows: certainly the scrape/scratch that nicked the reflective layer damaged the pits/lands right there. However, the reflective layer may have lost additional bits that flaked off *after* the initial damage, and perhaps the flaking process did not damage the pits/lands underneath as badly.

-brendan

Depending, of course, on your definition of "not an accurate rip"...

Not sure about EAC, but CDEX can sometimes be coerced into filling small unreadable bits with blocks of hex zero. It can sound like crap, but again, depending on desired quality, this can be bodged in a wave editor to sound not any worse than vinyl pops or other minor distortions. So if your goal is just to have the song play all the way through - try a different ripper. Or take a thorough read of EAC's docs. Perhaps EAC is trying too hard to keep it accurate.

If the damage is such that players lose their way to the next bit of data, though, the task gets a lot harder.