The present invention relates to a method for determining the format of an optical recording medium (1) comprising one or more data, audio and/or video tracks in one or more sessions, and an apparatus for reading from and/or writing to optical recording media (1) using such method.It is an object of the present invention to propose a method for determining the format of an optical recording medium (1), which is robust against partially incorrect data on the recording medium (1).This object is achieved by a method comprising the steps of: reading (101) the table of contents (TOC) of a first session of the recording medium (1); checking (102, 103, 32) whether more than one track is present in the first session and/or whether at least one track is indicated as being an audio track in the table of contents (TOC); and determining (104, 36) the format of the recording medium (1) to be audio if at least one of the checking steps (102, 103, 32) yields a positive result, and determining (105, 35) the format to be data else.