[Paranoia] CD without TOC, apparently

[Peter Jones]

On Thu, 2006-01-26 at 22:33 +1100, Lennon Cook wrote:
> (warning: possibly noob-ish question follows)
> I am attempting to rip a CD of 'The Murder Ballads' (Nick Cave and the
> Bad Seeds). cdparanoia -B tells me:
> ---
> 004: Unable to read table of contents header
> 
> Unable to open disc.  Is there an audio CD in the drive?
> ---
> The obvious answer becomes, 'yes there is' - it works fine on a dying
> stereo (hardware probably as old as consumer CDs). Also, it doesn't
> appear to be my hardware, since a different CD rips perfectly on this
> system.
> 
> What could cause this to happen? My thoughts stray to copy protection,
> although I would have thought that that would interfere with the
> stereo (and, I do believe - though I can't be sure - that I copied
> this CD on a Windows machine a few years ago).

Usually either particularly bad scratching on the TOC, or something
along the lines of DualDisc, where it doesn't actually meet the physical
requirements for a CD.

For the latter, it's very much a "may work in some drives, may not work
in others" thing.

-- 
  Peter