Chrysalis

I'm going to my library tomorrow, and I'm thinking about getting a few CDs. I plan to also rip said CDs to my hard drive.

However, with the CDs coming from a library, there will most likely be scratches on them. Will this have any effect on the mp3s I'll get (distortion, glitchy audio, etc)?

I'm just curious because I've really only ripped 2 CDs before.

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Burning Down

I've only had one bad experience ripping a CD from a library, where it looked as though a previous borrower had tried to record something onto it because the disc was all pitted and stuff. And I've borrowed a lot of discs from the library. To be honest, a lot of my own CDs are badly scratched or fingerprinted and they ripped fine onto my computer. So I really don't think you'll have a problem.

Freebase Dali

Scratches won't affect the quality of the music. If the integrity of the data on the disc is compromised, the song(s) simply won't be read and will error out for that portion of the disc.

GERD

Hi, I doubt it. I once ripped a cd, Senser "States Of Mind" I think, that was the most atrocious scratched disc I've ever seen. It looked like someone had gone over it with a brillo pad but it ripped fine.

Freebase Dali

The thing to remember about CDs and DVDs are that the actual data (the physical representation of 1s and 0s) is encoded onto the metallic disc beneath the clear plastic, in the form of "pits and lands". The burning laser physically burns pits into it to represent a state, and leaves a land to represent another state. As long as the disk is not so scratched that the CD/DVD drive read head can differentiate between these pits and lands on the inner metallic surface, the CD may as well be spotless for all the difference it would make.
The better your CD/DVD drive, the better chance that things will go off without a hitch.

Barring any physical damage to the actual low-level partitioning sectors, or damage across the entire disk in such a way that destroys the readability of all contiguous data, you should be fine.

s_k

Can I just add that a scratched CD may seem to sound fine as there's no distortion of some sort, but it isn't that simple.
Every CD player (also the ones in PC's) has an 'auto correction' built in. Without that auto correction, even an immaculate disc would skip within 2 seconds. Every CD player just buffers a bit of audio and if it can't read the audio, it just makes up a little. Sounds stupid, but there's 44.100 samples every second (which is not enough, in my opinion, by the way) so it should be inaudible if the player has to make up a few of them every second.
Point is, it is audible. A scratched CD may seem to play fine, but you lose stereo imaging, you lose dynamics, you lose transparency, you lose the tightness of your low-end. So there's more to it.

Eitherway, it'very true what Freebase says: The info is not on the bottom of the CD, there's first a couple of layers of plastic and such. The audio info is even more close to the label than it is to the bottom of the disc. This is going to sound silly; Your discs are better of when put face down, label up. STrange, eh?

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RoemerMW

I used to get most of my music by going to the library and ripping cd's. I only ever had a problem a few times, and when that happened it just wouldn't let me rip a song or two off the cd.

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