Are the CDs over-long, then? The original standard said 74 minutes (allegedly to accommodate Beethoven's 9th), but I've never had a problem ripping the 80-minute CDs that are now viewed as the maximum.
There are, as tfabris suggests, CD copy-protection mechanisms which can cause these symptoms. If the CD is multi-session, say dual-session, and has a bogus TOC in the second session, then audio CD players will play it correctly (as they're not typically multi-session aware), but CD-ROM drives will get confused.
I dunno. I had it in my mind that 700 MB was the limit for a "legal" CD, but that is only because Nero flags everything past that in red as a warning. I think 711 MB was the biggest disc in the set, but I don't think any of them ran much over 70 minutes, and some of them ran as little as 65 minutes/660 MB. Yet the last couple of tracks on every one of them (sometimes just one track, once as many as five) would not rip properly
on my home computer and three computers at work but yet ripped with no problems on a fourth work computer.
It didn't seem like the cd player was getting "confused" -- it found the tracks with no problem, but the closer it got to the outer edge of the CD, the more the performance degraded (in a quite linear fashion), first with artifacts, then pauses, then skips, then garbled sound, and finally just halted.
I have ripped similar CDs without difficulty, and since at least four different computers had trouble with this set, I think you may be right and these are just badly printed CDs.
tanstaafl.
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