I have some old audio CD-R discs that I cannot play reliably. One of them seems to have started deteriorating at a very accelerated rate: a little over a year ago, I was able to rip audio from it without problems. Today, I cannot play this disc without the sound breaking up, and I have not been able to rip audio from it, despite trying several different CD-ROM drives. Is the data on this disc lost, or is there some way to make the disc readable so that it can be played or ripped, even just once?

Check and make sure that the top side of the disk has not been scratched.

Hold it up to a light source and see if you can see light thru anywhere on the disk (other than the center hole of course!!!!)

I had a disk do exactly that.

I took a black sharpie and filled in the scratch marks and now it plays OK. Although it looks like a Dalmatian!

I ripped it and re-burnned it to another disk just in case.

These were probably burned in an older burner/drive??

anything -R or +R including RW works best in the drive that burned it. Accuracy in newer drives can render track 0 unreadable or partially unreadable, so that it can't find the location information for a specific block of data, even if there is no physical aberrations on the disk. If there is, do the Sharpie thing ... it works maybe half of the time for me.

When migrating to a new computer, if you are going to sell or retire the old one, I always recommend rearchiving anything on a self burnt disc.

Try a higher end audio CD player. These have the error correction capability lacking in many computer CD-ROM drives.

Maybe an analog rip will be possible.

Yes, burned CDs do regularly deteriorate. That's why it's not a great idea to keep your only copy of important docs - photos, tax info, etc. - on burned CDs and DVDs. I prefer external hard drive and then having more than one copy (different physical disk). The chance of two hard disks dying is much less than one. The chance of two 5-year-old CDs having deteriorated is much greater.

Andrew

These were CD-Rs that were burned by other people and then given to me. I may be stuck with playing the discs on an audio CD player and recording the output to a .wav file. This is somewhat of a relief because I know that two of these discs are still playable on a regular CD player. Thanks!