I’ve been asked to digitize a box of old CDs and move them onto an external SSD. For playback and data transfer, I’ve been using a MacBook Pro with an ASUS external disk drive. I also have access to a Windows desktop PC with an internal disk drive.
Last week, I successfully digitized several CDs using both the MacBook and the PC. I can still play those files normally off the external SSD. But when I returned to my project this week, the MacBook/ASUS setup was suddenly no longer recognizing those same CDs — nothing but my startup disk and external hard drive showed up in Disk Utility. I tried loading a CD to the PC, and it displayed .cda files rather than the .aiffs or .wavs it had displayed previously. I experimented with several other CDs; the problem occurred not only for CDs I’d already digitized, but also for ones I hadn’t touched yet. Again, as of last week these CDs were recognized by both Mac and Windows as carrying .aiff and .wav files, which I was able to copy to the SSD with no problem.
I tried fidgeting with the ASUS drive, and after awhile, Disk Utility did finally recognize one of the CDs. When I opened the CD in Finder, it displayed a list of .aiff files as anticipated. However, when I tried to test a data transfer by copying a single .aiff from the CD to the desktop, no dice — just an endless “Estimating time to copy” notice, and a very sluggish Finder which eventually had to be relaunched. Similarly, neither VLC nor QuickTime could play the file, and both went non-responsive/had to be force quit when playback was attempted.
In terms of purely just recovering the audio data, I can try using the PC setup to rip the CDs; I’m aware .cdas are a container/metadata format which don’t carry any audio information, but I believe I should still be able to rip using Windows Media Player. As for the Mac setup, though, I’m very curious to know what went wrong? Should I try to hunt down an old CD player to check on playback that way? Any insight appreciated, cheers!
