A method for determining the format of an optical recording medium (1) comprising one or more data or audio tracks or both types of tracks is proposed, the method being robust against partially corrupted data on the recording medium.The method comprises the steps of: reading (101) the table of contents (TOC); storing information from the table of contents; checking (102, 103, 105) whether all tracks are indicated as audio tracks or as data tracks or whether both audio tracks and data tracks are present; if one or more data tracks are present, checking (104, 106, 107) whether the first indicated data track contains any audio information; and determining the format according to the results of the checking steps (102-107).