The New Hotness

Mary gets books-on-CD at the annual library book sale, but she’s found they’re easier to use in MP3 format. We regard format transformation for our own use as covered by the First Sale Doctrine and Fair Use, but, obviously, various legal opinions differ.

I use Asunder to rip audio CDs, although it doesn’t handle non-recoverable errors very well at all. Wiping the offending disc with nose oil or ripping from a different drive will resolve most of the issues, but a recent acquisition had a nasty circumferential scratch in the middle of Track 7 that just didn’t respond to Black Magic.

CDparanoia can rip portions of a track, so a little binary search action extracts the usable data from Track 7:

cdparanoia "7-7[4:35]" Track7a.wav
cdparanoia III release 10.2 (September 11, 2008)

Ripping from sector  177155 (track  7 [0:00.00])
	  to sector  197780 (track  7 [4:35.00])

outputting to Track7a.wav

 (== PROGRESS == [                              | 197780 00 ] == :^D * ==)   

Done.

cdparanoia "7[5:30]-7" Track7b.wav
cdparanoia III release 10.2 (September 11, 2008)

Ripping from sector  201905 (track  7 [5:30.00])
	  to sector  208894 (track  7 [7:03.14])

outputting to Track7b.wav

 (== PROGRESS == [                              | 208894 00 ] == :^D * ==)   

Done.

With that in hand, you import the two WAV files into Audacity with a five second gap between them, drop two seconds of A-440 sine wave in the gap, and export to MP3.

The M3U playlist entry has the track time in seconds, so I hand-carved that entry to match the abbreviated length:

#EXTINF:376,Disc 14 Track 7
14-07 - Track 7.mp3

Done!