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Comment by phyzome | Hacker News Reader

Whoa, this update is weird:

« EDIT: After further investigation, I no longer believe it’s a factory defect. If I write the beginning or end of the affected track to a blank CD-R and rip it, the rip fails with the same error! Give it a try yourself with minimal.flac. »

https://github.com/jmillikin/john-millikin.com/blob/master/%...

Uh... so what's going on there? Something that breaks the error correction algorithm, or what? Can anyone with a burner repro this?

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Uh... so what's going on there? Something that breaks the error correction algorithm, or what?

It is likely "weak sectors", the bane of copy protection decades ago and of which plenty of detailed articles used to exist on the 'net, but now I can find only a few:

http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/magia-chisel/index.html

https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,50365.0.html

http://archive.li/rLugY

OK, wow! So basically CDs are not capable of recording arbitrary data, or at least most burners will fail on certain inputs, and the song in question causes trouble. Fascinating!

The first article is from 2003 and originally was in Russian: https://www.ixbt.com/optical/magia-chisel.shtml

> Can anyone with a burner repro this?

This comment just made me realize that I haven't had a system with a burner in it for probably about 10 years.. I'd be SOL if I needed to burn a CD for some reason.

My laptop has an optical drive, and I think it's supposed to be able to burn various disc types... but where do I find a blank CD-R? :-)

My mid-2000s car has a CD player but no aux port. Instead of going out to buy CD-Rs I asked friends on social media for any spare CD-Rs they were willing to get rid of. Lo and behold I now have over 400 blank CD-Rs that I didn’t pay a single cent for!

It's criminal how long it's taken for car manufacturers to put an aux port in. I suppose Bluetooth finally bypassed all that...

If you're in the US, I think you can still buy big packs at BestBuy.

I actually had to rip out the burner from my last computer and install it in my new computer the other day to help a friend try to diagnose an issue he was having with burned DVDs of his own work.

Sadly, I wasn't any help other than confirming his issue.

Here you go. I knew that still-sealed spindle of 10 CD-R collecting dust under my desk would come in handy one day.

https://hastebin.com/raw/pidequjaga

Fascinating, thank you!

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