EAC: best cd ripper... just for audio?

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insanarchist

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I wasn't 100% sure where to put this, but since most of the resident EAC experts hang out in this part of the forums, I figured it would make the most sense here. Now for my question...

So, the reason EAC is the best CD ripping program is because it, for all intents and purposes, does a bit-perfect copy of audio tracks, using sophisticated algorithms and such, correct? Assuming this, or some version of this, is true, wouldn't/shouldn't it be possible to use this technology to get data off of old data cd-r's that are throwing out cyclical redundancy errors? Or is my understanding of the technology completely out of whack?
 
Although it's technically feasable to do that, it isn't technically feasable to do that with EAC.
(in other words it is possible in theory to get a bit perfect copy of something off of a scratched CD. However I don't know of a specific program that can do this. EAC to the best of my knowledge doesn't do anything other than audio.)

edit: Just a heads up after re-reading your thread title, EAC=Exact Audio Copy.
 
The problem with tryign to get data like that is that if there is a scratch you can't read that data. For audio this means that it'll try a couple times and if all else fails it can interpolate the missing audio data. For a data track though if you have: 01001011010scratch1001101 it can try all it wants to recreate that data but there's no way for it to know what should be there. If anything you'd need some of the built in error correction on the disc to recover from scratches and the like, but if it says it can't read it... it can't read it
 
actually, data disks have error detection and correction like audio disks do. For the most part the error correction work transparently to the user, you never get an error message when the error correction works.

FYI a cdrom really holds about a gig of data, only 700 meg is usable because the rest is used by the error correction algorithm.

some drivers are better than others at extracting damaged data, Plextor for example is very good at getting data off the very worst of discs.
 
At this point the thread probably doesn't belong here anymore, it's more about reading data off of these scratched CDs. The best method I can think of is using one of those disc buffers that wear down the bottom of the disc a bit. That's assuming that the scratch is on the bottom. If it's located on the top (label side), which is closest to the actual data, then you sir are screwed--
 
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