Good morning,

I am afraid to lose some of my most-played music CDs. Cdparanoia had always been a great tool but now it asks for a little too much patience with one CD, which appears to have suffered from overuse in my car.

My question is: What shall I do, when the program just sits there, for ages, and... I do not know what it does... read the same sector for the ten-thousands of times without success.., or something. I already know, that there is a problem: :-P, but now the sequence “.o0O” is all that shows activity.

In the past I have already skipped whole tracks on other CDs, because cdparanoia took too long to accomplish. But this time, I fear that a lot more is unrecoverable.

So, do I wait until, let's say, midnight or can I securely assume, that this CD is to be abandoned ?

Thank you.

P.S.: A lesson that I should have learned much sooner: You buy music (for money), you make copies immediately!

And, different kinds of the copies of the copies (e.g: USB, disc, SS\H\D, phone and\or player, sheet music &c.)

Sometimes more priority works:for example? Then right click on that process.

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This way, the nice-value is reset to normal, each time that I try. But
appears to work. Cdparanoia still hangs at the same spot but I will wait a little longer.

Thanks anyway for the hint.

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i was sometimes lucky (waiting for hours) to get a good rip from an otherwise unusable cd - and sometimes not.

fwiw, cds can take quite a bit of manual cleaning e.g. with a wet cloth & dishwashing liquid, even scraping caked dirt off with your fingernails, and always a final dry polish with a soft cloth.

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And if you can, try different computers/cd drives. I have some cd's that don't like to read properly on one machine but work fine on another.

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drives wouldn't like a soapy rag, but also consider to clean the cd drive & esp. the lens (yes, opening a computer cd/dvd drive is a pita).

Look into `dd_rescue` (or was it `ddrescue`?). That program even has facilities for if the access of damaged media results in a frozen system.

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It is found as gddrescue in the Debian resources. A great tool that I should have known earlier. However, the first trial rather confirms my pessimistic assessment:
rescued 0B, errsize: 449M, run time: 8.76m, successful read: 8.76m ago.

I've heard of polishing the disc with brasso, but I've never tried it. I would assume a good cleaning, via a q-tip with light exposure to rubbing alcohol on the lens would help it read better. Which I have tried. Smokers and pets and the likes, optical drives don't like this place.

X runs at nice 0 and by default everything you launch under X runs at 0. So needy CLI stuff I run at -5 (mostly audio stuff like jackd). And unimportant needy things like browsers I run at 10. You probably shouldn't run it at nice -20 as that's what the kernel stuff runs at and you would want to avoid competition with the drivers for the devices.

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