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CDs May be Less Immortal than We Thought
Zordak writes "The near-immortality of CDs, sometimes used as an excuse by record companies as an argument for their high cost, may not be as eternal as touted. An article at CNN describes the problem of CD Rot rearing its head to deny you access to your music and data. The article also describes related problems with CD-Rs, CD-RWs and DVDs."
cd rot has been known about for years, there's been other /. articles about it
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/22/165825 1&mode=thread&tid=137&tid=198
Everyone that collects stuff on CD-Rs knows they don't last long... I've got some from two years ago that don't work, and it's the first time they've been removed from their case since they were burned...
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
CNN is a bit late to catch up with this...
They don't last 10 seconds in the microwave.
They don't do too well in close proximity to a Tesla coil, either.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
No, there's a limit on how many times you can encode the same playlist to CD. You can burn a song to CD as many times as you want.
I have a Blues Brothers CD (movie soundtrack) from 1980 that works perfectly to this day.
Bitchslapped. Neat.
You may have not been doing this for malicious reasons, but you're statement is inaccurate! :)
According to Apple's site you can write songs an unlimited amount of times. You can only write a specific PLAYLISTS X amount of times. I think it's 5.
I have burned songs to CDs quite a few times and never had a problem. I've made at least 20 backups of my music collection, including purchased AACs.
iTunes has a very fair and very liberal usage policy IMO.
Zed's dead baby. Zed's dead.
Considering that the CD standard wasn't established until 1981, and they weren't launched until 1982 -- I think you may be mistaken.
r /c over1002.shtml
http://www.medialinenews.com/issues/2002/octobe
When that beard turns white he will make a great Gandolf though.
There is a reason people back up to tape even though it costs more per gigabyte then hard disks.
This is the AIT1 spec from Sony.
Avg. media uses: greater than 30,000
Media archival: greater than 30 years
Average head life: minimum 50,000 recording head contact hours
Media drum wraps: 100,000 times
Tape repositioning: 1,000,000 cycles
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
My first CD-Rs (over 10 years old) also still work perfectly. Some simple rules I follow are:
- Buy CD-Rs withouth printed label (the printing process causes material stress)
- Burn them at low speed (the lowest my current burner allows with my SW is 8x)
- Verify the data after writing (very important!)
- Always be careful with the label side (e.g. don't put that side on the table, dirt could cause scratches)
- Prevent hot temperatures and direct sunlight
I later found some advisory text that basically said the same thing.
It's come up before here on /. and elsewhere...no medium has perfect longevity; optical, magneto-optical, magnetic, even paper all fade in time. The solution is to make a fresh copy at regular intervals with minimal handling of the master. The goal is to maximize the duration a copy will last, so that if it gets lost for a while, it can be reclaimed. This is what librarys are always doing with books. It just sucks that CD's were touted as some sort of immortal storage format, and now, probably as a result of cost cutting, some brands won't even last a couple of years.
I now have a dream that congress will use this to realize that we need our fair use back. I'm not holding my breath.
Underloved Movies and Pub Quiz: donotquestionme.org
I later found some advisory text that basically said the same thing.
/. before) here
I googled a bit and found that text again (was in
Assuming that any given EULA is valid, (a big jump, but follow along with me here) violation of it is either breach of contract or copyright violation. Both of those things are torts, are against the law, and conceivably will land you in civil court. In civil court the worst they can do is take your money.
I think you are confusing the word illegal with criminal. Words mean things, and illegal means "against the law." The important difference is that crimes land you in a criminal trial, where they can take your freedom.
Breach of contract may not be criminal, but is illegal. In most cases, copyright infringement is not a crime, but a tort, and still illegal.
Most of the problems of cd rot can be traced to the stickers used for labels, not the cds themselves.
I have seen post-it-notes pull the foil off older cheap cd-rs.
I saw one study a while back that showed that the biggest problem was the labels that people were putting on burned cdrs. They cause damage to the adhesive holding the foil to the media. It would not surprise me if it did.
Commercial cds (including data cds) are a different story. I have some incredibly old cds going back to the 80s. They all work fine.
DVDs tend to have a layer of plastic between the foil and the outside. (Probably just for this problem.) Of couse, that may just be the good brands...
Much of this story is standard media scare/hype. ("If you don't listen to us YOUR DATA COULD DIE!") It is based on a real problem though.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
I've got a Beatles CD that says (C) 1963 right on the disc. Either the CD format was in beta longer than we thought, or more likely, the copyright applies to the audio recording independent of the medium it's fixed in.
Try FLAC for non-lossy compression of WAV files...
All those suggestions are good except this one:
- Burn them at low speed (the lowest my current burner allows with my SW is 8x)
This is actually false, at least pertaining to newer faster drives. The new drives are less accurate when writing at low speeds, because they are built with the assumption that people will burn at the highest speed available to them. Thus burning at slower speeds actually degrades the accuracy of the burn, which may result in sooner than normal data loss.
However all the rest are right on the money.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
The label side IS where the data is. The "bottom" side is just a piece of plastic. The reflective layer and all the good stuff is on top. On a factory CD, that's covered with silkscreened ink. If the bottom gets scratched up, you can buff out the scratches with no damage. The "CD/DVD DRx" tool that you can buy in the stores is actually just a ring of fine (like, 2000 grit) wet/dry sandpaper, and the tool sands the scratches out of the bottom of the disc.
I personally put the round labels on the top; it protects the top from scratches. I know, I've heard people saying labels are bad for the discs, but so far I've been doing the label thing for about 5 years, across about 4000 CDs and DVDs, and no problems so far.
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/08/24/1253248.shtm l?tid=126&tid=137&tid=198
h tm l?tid=137&tid=198
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/04/22/1658251.s
It's good to know these things eventually filter down to CNN.
Kodak Gold CDs - which are the discs which quote 100 year life span, use an inert gold refective substrate, and the dye technology used for the write layer is quite similar to the dyes used for their film stocks. Typically these disc will have a slower maximum burn speed as they need slightly more heat/energy to set to dye state to a 1 or 0.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
What really matters is not how your cdrs have been rebranded, but who originally made them.
Fujifilm spindles that say "Made in Japan" on them are made by Taiyo Yuden, one of the higher quality cdr fabs... but Memorex "Made in Taiwan" can either be Prodisc or CMC (flaky).
I'm more than a little dissapointed that both my local CompUSA and Best Buy are replacing Made-in-Japan Fujifilm spindles with Made-in-Taiwan Fujifilm for 50 and 100 disc spindles, leaving me with the 30 disc spindles.
Yup, the label side has less protection than the data side. Always put your cd on the data side, you'll need a bigger dent in it to make that CD unreadable versus the label side.
Check out CDs, DVDs Eyed For Long-Term Archival Use, because a lot of this has already been covered...
Kodak no longer sells the "Gold" CD-R's that are supposed to last for a very long time. However, Mitsui (Colorado Springs, CO) is still selling them.
On CD-R, the physical structure is that there's about 1 mm of plastic on the bottom (non-label), then a data layer, then the reflective layer, then a thin layer of laquer(?) then the label.
Since the reflective layer is so close to the label side, writing on the label side with a hard-tip pen will damage/distort/dimple the reflective layer.
DVD-R is much better, the data/reflective layer is in the middle of the media, roughly 0.6mm of plastic on *both* sides. (The reason that the data layer is at a different depth is because DVD media was designed for dual-sided, unlike CD-R.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I've been saying this since CD's really hit the market. I was working in top 40 radio at the time we switched from vinyl to CDs. What I noticed is that CDs do degrade over time. It's like they lose their dynamic headroom, but not their fidelity. In other words, frequently played CDs had to be turned up a little more than others. I attributed this to the cheap alluminum (sp?) or the plastic oxidizing (or something) in the prescence of light.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm sure I can reproduce this and it is easily measurable.
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you