On Thursday, 1 January 2026 21:46:27 Greenwich Mean Time Alan Mackenzie wrote: > Hello, Gentoo. > > Happy New Year! > > On my (no longer quite so) new PC, I've still not managed to get audio > CDs to play properly. Originally I was using the program aqualung, but > that gave a constant crackle on top of the music, making it unusable. > (But it was fine on my old PC.) > > I've since moved to deadbeef (officially called DeaDBeeF), which though > much better is still not right. What I get now on playing a CD is: > (i) the first track of the CD gets ~6 seconds of crackle at the start; > (ii) at each subsequent track (regardless of whether there are any actual > gaps between the tracks) there is about 2 seconds of crackle at the > beginning; > (iii) if I pause the playback and restart it, there is no extra crackle; > (iv) on moving the playback to a random part of the track, I get the ~6 > seconds of crackle; > (v) there are random moments of crackle in the middle of tracks, too, > often ~6 seconds after an audible drive head movement. > > I've spend quite some time trying to modify deadbeef's source to > eliminate the beginning of track crackle, so far without success. > > However, one thing I did try was to double the sampling speed from 44,100 > samples/sec to 88,200 in deadbeef's settings menu. This doubled the > speed of the music, putting it up an octave; useless for listening. > However, doing this gave only ~3 seconds of crackle at the start of the > CD. This strongly suggests that my problem is at the CD end of the > chain, not the ALSA end. > > I've come to suspect that I have a fault in the DVD drive that I'm using > for this. When I use it to record a DVD+RW disk with backup stuff, it > usually takes quite some time before it recognises the first ?sector on > the disk, after which it records the rest of the image correctly, without > problems. > > Does anybody know if there are any programs I could use to test my DVD > drive? If so, please tell me about one. Such a program would be > preferable to the alternative of hoiking the DVD drive out of my old PC > and connecting it up to the new. (I'm no longer an enthusiast of > dismantling PCs.) > > Any help here would be most welcome. > > Thanks!
>From what you're describing this seems to be a hardware issue. It is likely there's some dust/fluff on the drive's pickup laser lens, or the lens is reaching the end of its life - cheap ones don't last very long under continuous use. Depending on the design of the drive, access to the lens may be difficult without dismantling the drive. With some CD/DVD drives, especially on laptops, the whole head and lens assembly slides out when you eject the drive, allowing unimpeded access to the lens. Other drives keep the head within the DVD case, necessitating taking the drive apart. Compressed air and a cotton bud with isopropyl alcohol ought to deal with any dust on the lens in short order. If you cannot access the lens and disassembly is not a favoured option, see if you can direct compressed air inside the drive after ejecting the disc carriage, to blow out any dust which may be covering the lens. There are inexpensive cleaning discs sold for CDs and DVDs, with small brushes on them. I've never used them and would hesitate to do so. Brushes running over the lens at high speed could well scratch the lens surface, badly. In addition, the DVD lens is closer to the disc than CDs. The wrong cleaning disc could cause worse damage than what you are trying to fix.
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
