Damaged CD Data Recovery

I finally found an old audio CD of mine, and discovered several scratches. The second song is a mess, and the third has many problems as well.

I was wondering if anyone knows of a free CD data recovery program. I don't have a backup of this CD, so I'd rather pull the music off than buy a new copy.

I read about such a utility a while back, but can't remember the name. My searches have yielded little but free trials that don't allow you to save recovered files, and the only one that would let me save couldn't recover the files. When I tried lowering the speed of the drive with Nero DriveSpeed the program just gave me 1KB files for every song on the CD. I searched SourceForge, one of the few places thought might have something, but found nothing.

Anyone else have any experience here?

You could try disc-doctor or some similar device for refinishing damaged CDs. As long as the label side is intact, you should be able to polish the worst of the scratches away and be able to strip the data off.

An alcohol pad can be used to buff light scratches out, too, using a circular motion mostly toward and away from the hub (light transverse scratches can be ignored by the player for the most part).

What's the CD of, if you don't mind me asking?

I've considered the disc doctor things before, but haven't known anyone that's used one and I wasn't sure how well they actually work. I'll have to look into that some more though I suppose, as I think I remember them being able to repair DVD's and console games as well. Don't think it's going to help now though, as I was examining the disk a little closer and realized those weren't scratches on the bottom, but on the label side. They go clean through the label, all data there is gone forever. I'm noticing a few other marks on the label too, I guess I will go ahead and pull of everything but the second and third, as dBPoweramp throws an error a little ways into the second track. I suppose I could pull One Step Closer and With You from one of the online download places, I'd just have to do some research on each. Including the monthly fee, it' be about $5 I think, much less than a new CD. I'd still rather have the raw .wav from the CD so I could compress it into Ogg, but I think saving $10 bucks will justify the the mp3's. I don't think converting those to Ogg will do much damage to quality, but I'll have to find out. After using Ogg, especially with variable bitrates, I can't stand mp3's anymore.

Have you tried the DiscDoctor things before? I've always been suspicious of them, I read mixed reviews on epinions.

It's the first Linkin Park CD.

Thanks Dngrs.

Yes, they work great on mild and medium scratches. I have only one CD that I wasn't able to recover, actually, and it looked like it was used as a hocky puck in a sand box. But despite that, I did pull 60% of the music off it. I never took the time to try and polish the heck out of it some more... better things to do than that and took the price of a new one of out the offender's allowance money

That's a good CD, too.