Question How to rip a CD burned with the wrong track timings?

TimPShep

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I'm ripping some old audio CDs that I burned long ago, and have several bizarre hybrid CDs.
The CD is, let's say, called CD1 by Artist 1 but shows up as CD2 by Artist 2 in Exact Audio Copy, according to the CD's own indexing and EAC's online search. In other words the CD plays the CD1 music okay, but the tracks are broken into the same lengths and silent gaps as CD2.
I must have somehow set up to burn the CD by keeping the track scheme for the previous CD I burned.

So - any ideas how I can rip such a CD to flac files that are the correct length, instead of following the lengths that the CD says they are?

I'm a beginner with EAC, but I noticed that dBPoweramp CD Ripper (which I don't have) has an option called Rip As One, which I think could be used to rip the whole CD as one track and impose track divisions of your own choice and timings? Can EAC do the same thing?
Probably the most awkward thing is coping with the silent gaps between the tracks, which of course are actually in the middle of the actual songs. Is there a way to get the software to accurately remove those, or will I have to put them all into an audio editor and do it by hand? That would probably be too laborious.
 
Are you saying that artificial gaps are being inserted in the tracks? It reads not as you say that that it plays OK but then go on to say there are gaps. Is this is the case I've no idea how it could have happened but manually removing the gaps will be the only option.

Or is it just the metadata tags that are incorrect? I haven't used EAC for while so not sure what database search options are available. Some ripping software will allow the metadata to be searched by inspecting the tracks on the disc.

It might be easier to manually correct the tags. MP3Tag is an excellent piece of software & although free to use, I would urge you to consider donating to its author.

 
No, there are no artificial gaps being inserted. But when the CD plays, the player is told that the tracks are different lengths to their original lengths (because the CD was burned as if it was a different CD).

So let's say track 1 will play, and the player thinks it is a 5 minute track, but the actual audio was a 3 minute track. So at the 3 minute mark there is a normal 2 second silence before the second song starts, but this is burned in not a pause by the player. Then at 5 minutes the player thinks the first track has finished, but it's actually already played 2 minutes of the second song. Then the player plays track 2, as indexed on the CD, but it's actually continuing the rest of the second song.

I thought that the CD also had the normal silent gaps between the tracks it thinks it contains, but at least on the CD I've checked that's not the case - the tracks run together seamlessly with no extra silences.

So I think the solution would be to rip the CD as one long audio, ignoring the track markers. Then an audio editor could divide that single audio into individual correct tracks by detecting the silent gaps from the original, correct songs. Then I'd have to tag and name the tracks, but that could probably be done automatically once the tracks are the correct lengths.

If so, how can I rip the CD as one audio, and can EAC do it?

Or can I even override the CD's track lengths when ripping, and impose the original, correct track lengths found from a database? Or just use the silences to divide the whole CD into correct tracks? That would do everything needed in one go.
 
Try Audacity - free software. This will allow you to chop up the tracks and/or re-combine any way you want to create a tracks the way you want.

 
So is that playback behaviour carried through to the rip? Using your example, is track 1 combined with 2 mins of track 2 into a single file?
 
So is that playback behaviour carried through to the rip? Using your example, is track 1 combined with 2 mins of track 2 into a single file?
Yes, because that's what the problem CD thinks are the proper tracks. The CD itself works ok, the problem is just the way that the wrong track timings were imposed at the time of burning. I think my burning software had analysed the previous CD I burned, and kept that list of track timings, imposing it on a completely new CD that I copied. Strange but true!
 
1605702242768.png


This will create the single file you desire. But you'll then need to open it & manually export the individual tracks in something like Audacity as @larkone referenced.

The Copy Range option that @mseve1 mentions might be able to rip the tracks directly, but you'll need to be quite precise with the track timings. Certainly worth a try. It's a choice between trying to calculate the timing of the real gaps vs being able to actually see then in Audacity.
 
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This will create the single file you desire. But you'll then need to open it & manually export the individual tracks in something like Audacity as @larkone referenced.
Thanks! That certainly helps. The unique terminology used in various programmes is half the problem, so I hadn't realised that Copy Image and Create Cue Sheet referred to the CD image rather than the cover image that there's also an option to copy.
 
Is there a way to download CUEsheets from the net?
I've been digging into how to achieve this re-dividing of incorrectly burned tracks, as I described above, and I've realised that having a correct cuesheet would be the second part of the process, having ripped the whole CD as one single file. The correct cuesheet would mean I could use EAC to divide the single file into the right tracks, labeled and tagged too.

The trouble is that cuesheet software or menu options are all about either:
  • Creating a cuesheet from your CD/recording - I can't do this because the CD tracks are wrongly divided, and the CD and online databases think it's a completely different CD title
  • Using a cuesheet you've already got - which I haven't

My research has found that there was an site called cuesheetheaven that extracted the cuesheet info from FreeDB online when that still existed. But I can't find any current repository of cuesheets, or any facility to get/create one from the free online databases like MagicBrainz.
Does anyone know of a way to download a cuesheet from anywhere, for a specific CD?
 
Even if you find the correct cue sheet, you'll still need a splitter like Medieval to break the single file into tracks.

With Audacity, all you need do is load the file, highlight the tracks visibly one by one & then export them to FLAC.

1605987877688.png
 
Even if you find the correct cue sheet, you'll still need a splitter like Medieval to break the single file into tracks.

With Audacity, all you need do is load the file, highlight the tracks visibly one by one & then export them to FLAC.
I was pretty sure EAC would do the splitting the single file into tracks from the cuesheet, and tag and title them too?
I just tried Audacity for splitting by hand and it was a bit laborious - I used the Detect Silence option to create labels at the right places, but each label had to be titled by hand, then when exporting I had to tag each track by hand, since each track was by a different artist.
With a cuesheet file that could all happen automatically, saving about half an hour per CD.

Since the online CD identification databases collect all the data from hundreds of people ripping each CD, I'm surprised it's not easy to find those cuesheets. Is there someone who would know where?
 
Looks like EAC may be able to split a WAV file but not FLAC, so you'd have to create WAV first & then convert it to FLAC later. But it's a process I've never used.

You don't have to create labels in Audacity. As I said, you simply highlight a track & Export Selected. You don't need to enter anything but a track number on Export either. Once you have all the tracks exported you can then hopefully find the disc metada in one go through MP3Tag.
 

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