I need to check if a lot of audio CDs are damaged or not and would prefer not to have to listen to them all.

Is there a good way to do this quickly?


cdparanoia can attempt to rip the audio data to a null device, and as a side effect tell you how damaged the discs are.

cdparanoia -q -p -X 1- /dev/null
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    On average, with good discs, this is fairly quick. With full paranoia on a scratched disk, it will take hours. – tripleee Jul 9 '13 at 12:53

I believe you can use safecopy to do this. It also has the added bonus of being able to recover data from failed/failing discs as well.



How to use it was covered previously in this U&L Q&A titled: How do I run safecopy in terminal?.

$ safecopy --stage1 /dev/source /dev/null

After this is complete a file should show up named stage1.badblocks. If it's empty then the disc is fine.

  • Unless safecopy explicitly supports Audio CDs (they don't look like a block device), it won't work. – sendmoreinfo Jul 9 '13 at 6:24
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    The websites says it can do Audio CDs. – slm Jul 9 '13 at 6:25

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