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."

Comments

old news

[simcop2387]

cd rot has been known about for years, there's been other /. articles about it

Re:old news

[gujo-odori]

If you read a variety of news sites, you'll see that /. is never first with the news, and not often even fast with the news. It's not unusual to see something here that I first read weeks ago elsewhere.

That's unavoidable, because /. is not a news reporting site, it's an aggragating site for news that was first reported elsewhere. The value of /. is not in being first with the news; the value of /. is in gathering a lot of news in one place for the convenience of trolls ;-)

Re:funny you say that

[CanSpice]

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.

FUD ALERT!

[btlzu2]

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.

Re:I remember when

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that the CD standard wasn't established until 1981, and they weren't launched until 1982 -- I think you may be mistaken.

http://www.medialinenews.com/issues/2002/october /c over1002.shtml

Re:Hey here's a semi-on-topic question

[Kenja]

"What DIGITAL media lasts longest? My first instinct is to say some type of tape, but tape drives seem to come in and go out of fashion fairly quickly. IDE drives might be another alternative..."

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

Re:CD-Rs good after 10 years.

[ByteSlicer]

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.

The Article is NOT About CD-Rs

[cft_128]

The article is about normal CDs and DVDs, the ones that the RI/MPAA wants us to buy and not make backups of. I know this article is a bit of a dupe but it is not the old CD-R suck so bad they are unreadable before the burn is finished.

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.

Re:CD-Rs good after 10 years.

[ByteSlicer]

I later found some advisory text that basically said the same thing.

I googled a bit and found that text again (was in /. before) here

Re:I remember when

[Waffle Iron]

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.

Re:CD-Rs good after 10 years.

[DA-MAN]

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.

Re:Not the whole story

[RenaissanceGeek]

DVDs tend to have a layer of plastic between the foil and the outside. (Probably just for this problem.)

No, sorry: DVDs have a plastic layer between the foil and the outside because the DVD standard allows for double-sided disks: the foil (reflective) layer has to be in the same place on ALL disks, though, so your single-sided DVDs will have that extra layer of plastic to "fill out" the disk to the proper thickness.

Re:CD-Rs good after 10 years.

[jridley]

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.

Archival CDs

[Macgrrl]

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.