Several years ago, before GoddessJ got the MP3 religion, she always carried huge “books” of CDs around with her when we went on long car trips — until on one trip she lost a case containing a dozen or so of her all-time favorite CDs, and realized that she’d never given those CDs to me to make MP3 backups of them. (She still hasn’t managed to replace all of them.) After that I went through and recorded every CD we owned, and she started religiously giving me all her new CDs to back up.

I went to record her two latest acquisitions a couple days ago, and discovered that one of them (Paula Abdul, Greatest Hits: Straight up!) had some kind of manufacturing defect. (No, it’s not DRM. 🙂 ) The first eleven tracks would play perfectly, but the last seven got progressively worse… they would always come out with “skips,” no matter what drive I tried them in, and the further back the track was, the more damaged sections it had. The last couple were all but unplayable, they were so bad. The disk itself had no scratches or other visible flaws, not even a stray fingerprint, so I’m not sure what could have caused this.

I knew that some programs were better at handling this sort of thing than others, so I checked around the ‘net and discovered a program, Exact Audio Copy (EAC), that was designed specifically for this kind of problem. It keeps trying until it gets the complete file or you lose patience and tell it to give up. It’s a Windows program, but it works perfectly in Linux (under WINE) as well. And it’s freeware too! I installed it, set it up the way I wanted it (which took a little experimentation), and let it rip — pun completely intentional. 🙂

It spent twenty-three hours grinding away at it on my laptop’s internal drive, and still hadn’t managed to get through the last half of the last track. I moved the disk to my external CD drive, and after a little more than an hour it was finished. And the files sounded perfect!

I highly recommend EAC for anyone who backs up music CDs.