Slashdot Mirror
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."
I recently had to restore some data from CD-Rs I wrote a long time ago. One was labelled Sep 23rd 1993. Back when you got a 63minute CD-R for 25 ($40) a piece.
Everything restored perfectly. Now, I wonder whether todays discs at less than 1/100 of that price will even last remotely as long as those discs did.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
So, the RIAA has argued that we merely have a license for one copy of the music when we buy a CD. When the CD corrodes, does this mean we can turn in the rotted disc for a pristine one?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
CD's originally included Tellurium in their composition when they first came out, and a lot of people were concerned that it would oxidize. The effect would be that CD's produced in 1981 would become unreadable in ten years or so. I'm given to understand that aluminum is now used, but I wonder what ever became of those early CD's.
The whole music industry may be less immoral than we've ever thought.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Take my DVD collection, for example. Already the companies are battling to define the next standard. Who wants to bet that, if I take my DVDs down to the Target and ask for the same movie in the new format, I'm gonna get laughed into the ground? People's Betamax tapes are probably rotting too, you know?
A technology-independent, perpetual, safe storage service for the general public is just a business opportunity waiting to happen. So is the market to sell rights to a movie or song, independent of its format.
What media lasts LONGEST?
I mean, other than paper, or stone.
Ok, ammend. 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...
So, for your money, what's the best media to store backups of your digital data? Anyone, anyone?
-- The unsig...
This is old news. I remember hearing about this back in 89 or so. The problem is worse if CDs are left out in open air, and in light. If memory serves, for longer lasting CDs, they need to be stored in the dark (not just in its case, but in a dark place like a drawer or safe).
I also think the newer CDs are more prone to this problem than the older ones. I don't know if the materials are much different, or thinner, in order to increase writing speed, but I have noticed that my newer CDs appear to show these signs fairly quickly, sometimes as early as just a few months -- especially if I don't keep them properly stored.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Stabilized? They just came out with a sixth standard (DVD-R DL), and a seventh (DVD+R DL) is just around the corner.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
All of the cd's that I have that have "rotted" or lost the metal layer that holds that data. Have been blank topped cd's ie no printing no nothing on top, just shiny metal. The cd's that I have that are labled or printed on don't seem to have any problem. I live in southern california and leave my cd's in my dark colored truck year round. Commercial Cd's and branded printed cd's seem fine as well as cd's with stickers on them.
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
Digital format yes, but I would not use any lossy compression like MP3 for archival purposes. I don't use MP3 for general listening either. The fact that its sampling resolution is only 26ms and the music I perform and listen to has ornaments of 50ms or less means that MP3 destroys a lot of fine detail that I worked hard to create. And yes, I can hear the difference, but that's because I am specifically listening for it.
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
I don't recall a "license" ever coming in to it.
I thought their argument is simply that as copyright holder they are the only people entitled to create copies outside of "fair use".
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Anyone know if the color and opacity of the CDR disk have an effect on durability?
Its been my observation that the darker blue medium and opaque CDRs work better than ligher colored (more silver) and more transparent ones. I think the Verbatim's from the 1x/2x/4x days are the best: Deep blue medium, yellow/gold/green recorded region, and the top layer was thick and not prone to be scratched off like today's CDRs.
Using this logic..CDR media gets worse as recording speed of drives are pushed faster. But I haven't found quantative data to back this up.
$cat
I keep a set in my car trunk and just hope nobody steals my car and reads through my files
You'd better also hope your house doesn't burn down while the car's parked in the garage.
Weren't there some companies in the World Trade Center whose idea of an off-site backup was to put a copy of their data in the other tower?
I think he went the way of the Internet Stock Boom....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
IANAL but I do believe this fits into the DMC. Violation of the DMC is ILLEGAL... if you disagree with that... welcome to the club, write your congress person.
The phenomenon of CD-Rot has been known for at least 15 years.
I believe it comes about when there are microscopic pin-holes in the aluminium layer within the CD. Over time, an effect akin to surface-tension in liquids causes these holes to grow - until they get sufficiently large (and numerous) to cause enough data dropout to overwhelm the error correction mechanisms of the player.
CD's that never had pin-holes don't develop them later - which explains how come some disks are magically immune to the problem where others die in only a few years.
I once heard that you can actually see these pin-holes once they've grown to a size that's not yet large enough to cause permenant errors. Hold the disk up to a bright light and see if you can see them. This may give you time to back up one that's "on the way out" before you lose it completely.
I believe the manufacturers developed an alternative material for the reflective layer about 10 years ago - but most pressing plants have not switched over to it. I wonder whether their reluctance to do so is rooted in a desire to have people re-buy the same CD's over and over.
www.sjbaker.org
A lot of my old CDs are unplayable now, but that's because they've had beer poured on them and have been stacked outside the case in stacks of 50 for months at a time. I think some of my CD-Rs from 97 will still play.
Anyway, now I'm burning *a lot* of DVD-Rs to fair use archive my favorite TV shows (about 1-2 discs per day, sometimes more). I'm being very careful to keep them in a case all the time, away from dust, not touching them, and I probably won't play them all that much.
I will probably buy a storage server of super cheap hard drives 2-3 TB in a couple years, plus I will probably copy them to higher density media again in a couple years. I'm spending about $0.70/DVD now, and I expect I'll end up with a couple or three hundred DVDs of TV (we'll have high-def on demand soon enough).
I just hope these DVDs last at least 2 years with good care, away from dust and light. Is that reasonable?
Never! Remember when DVDs came out?
DVDs have so much storage space, that every movie will have three soundtracks of your choice, seventeen language selections, and every key scene will be shot at six angles and you can choose which angle you want to watch it in!
Meanwhile, back in the Real World, DVDs still come with a single soundtrack, two or three languages (if you're lucky -- my Mandarin Chinese-speaking wife must get DVDs from Taiwan, *NOT* from Wal-Mart down the street), and sometimes a deleted scene or two, but *NEVER* alternate-angle scenes or anything like it.
Now we find out they don't last very long, and you gotta keep buying the same movies, CDs, etc every decade because they only last for a few years?
Surprise! You've been had. Again.
But don't worry. You can believe them when they say DRM won't lock you out of your media. And they won't change the terms of service on their DRM after you've already purchased the media, like Apple did.
Trust them.
fifth sigma, inc.
the article mentions what happens if the CD were left in hotter conditions persistently. However could leaving CD's in colder conditions (such as refrigerating or freezing) the CD do anything to preserve it? Just a thought...
...in bed
I saw this site: http://store.mam-a-store.com/ which has "archival" type of CDs. How good are these? The site claims it has special CDs with special coatings, improved dyes, and even a water-based marking pen to label them. Does this stuff work? It does seem that plain old CompUSA recordables won't last very long, especially if they are marked with a Sharpie, which is what we all do. If I have files that I want to last for many years, what should I do with them? ---------- Free mobile porn
When they are using taxpayer money to do the tests, I don't see why the results (1) can't be disclosed and (2) shouldn't be disclosed (we paid for it!).
Having thought about this problem, I think I came up with a decent solution to cover my ass. I normally rip my CDs to wav and mp3 files as soon as I open the CD. The mp3s go to my portable player for playing, the wavs to a 2nd hard drive for home use, and the CDs back into their cases.
.wavs in a hard-drive backup means the only way I will ever lose any music (outside of crime or catastrophe) is if the CDs and hard drive all die together before I can replace them. It could happen, but the odds are against it.
:-)
While neither CDs, DVDs nor hard drives last forever, having the
This is off-topic, but I'm also looking forward to the day when portable players have advanced to the 400gb-1 terabyte storage level so that encoding in lossy formats like AAC, MP3, or WMA aren't necessary. Plain old wavs with their higher fidelity, boo-yah! One can dream,
Peace.
The Article was wrong about one thing tapes are definately a good storage medium. My Mum and Dad had some old real to real tapes sent over from england by their Mum and Dad, that were say over 30 yrs old. They lived in a shed for the last 20 yrs in a plastic bag going through tempreture variations from 0 degrees C at night to over 40 degrees C during the day throughout several years. I went to convert them to digital format and I thought I was going to have to spend weeks using a computer studio to refine the sound. But after all that abuse the tracks from these real to real tapes were of really good quality and it only took me an hour to clean them up.
Please remember, Best does not always equal good. When I was a mechanic, working the night shift, out on the tarmac for eight hours, in the rain, up 65 feet in the air to change a position light on the top of the vertical fin of a 747, I used to think that anybody who worked indoors had NO right to complain about their jobs. It actually took me eight years of nice cushy work in the editing room and master control to realize how wrong I was. Possibly bad analogy, but my point is that ANY DRM, no matter how weak, is not good. It may seem acceptable now, but down the road there will be trouble. It's the old slippery slope routine. It starts out voluntary, but becomes mandatory later. Please don't support it. If you need music that badly, buy from independants, or whistle, or sing. Don't buy DRM. It virtually killed the minidisk for all practical purposes, and did the same to DAT. It will make your computer useless for anything but a purchasing appliance from BIGCO.
What?
You know, you could probably ask to see the info through a Freedom of Information Act request...
BUT...i'm wondering, and i am admittedly ignorant about the potential for this working...could there be a way to ditch the reflective layer entirely and just have a tracking read 'head' above the cd? it would seem to me that instead of reading the reflected spaces of something/not-something you could just read them by seeing what was passing through to the other side of the disc...???
i'm sure no **IA wouldn't let any technology that let us read media forever (or more than 2-6 years) become a standard though...
- I'd prefer not to.
This is actually false, at least pertaining to newer faster drives.
You're correct to the extent that you use the disc in the same (or an equivalent-spec) drive. However, CDs intended for use in audio players or old (=12x) drives should be burned at no more than 12x; burning at higher speeds is done using CAV (constant angular velocity), which tends to confuse low-speed drives.
a way to ditch the reflective layer entirely and just have a tracking read 'head' above the cd? it would seem to me that instead of reading the reflected spaces of something/not-something you could just read them by seeing what was passing through to the other side of the disc...???
but then you've got a more complex system with stuff to move on both sides, bigger device, etc. however, do a google search for magneto-optical media, it's used in minidiscs and it uses magnets to read/write info, and a laser fires at the optical part that heats up the magnet on the other side of the media to where it can be written to. under that temp, the magnet can't be changed. lifetime warranty on all discs
the cd eating fungus
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"The reason why people, informed people at least, are buying from Apple"
No, that's why a few people with an inflated opinion of their intelligence buy from iTunes.
REALLY smart people real realize that CD's are routinely available for well under $9 US (http://www.bmgmusic.com). Further they understand that there is no restriction on the CD, I can sell it when I want, where I want, I can make copies to preserve the original, and the sonic quality is significantly better than iTMS.
Oh, did I mention it's cheaper per album? I suppose if you're ADHD and listen to top ten hits, you can save a few bucks, but generally artists worth listening to have entire albums worth listening to. Its not all about the hits. At least not to anyone over the age of 11.
Allow me to ask you a few questions
1) Do you think its okay that I can listen to a song that I purchased where I want, when I want, in any device that I want?
2) Is it okay that you can't sell the song when you're tired of it?
3) Do you find it acceptable that someone else tells you in what manner you may use the song?
Okay, so their lifespan isn't as interminable as the RIAA and MPAA would like us to believe. This isn't a new development. It's been known about for years, but (for obvious reasons) the mass-producers of these things aren't in a hurry to let us know that they'll only last a little bit longer than the average cassette, and only if you take extraordinarily good care of it every time you handle it for the rest of your (un?)natural life.
A new development, in terms of spacetime and the existence of all things, are these copy-protecte discs that don't even allow us to secure our purchased goods with backup copies.
Oh, and try this one on: last May my car was broken into, and several of my CDs were stolen. Lucky me, I backup most of my CDs. But I was recently approached by someone who was "concerned" about the fact that I have a 50-CD spindle of audio CDR's in my car -- naturally, the person is thinking piracy. And naturally, at least a few of the CDs are pirated copies -- but suppose none of them were: someone could quite plausibly be found guilty of music piracy to the tune of a couple thousand dollars just because their CDs are stolen. After all, if you don't own it, how can you prove that your copies are legit?
I no longer remember the purpose of this, so I'll end on that note. Just food for thought.
I have a Yes 90125 CD I bought in 1985 and it plays just fine. The only CD I have that has visible "pin holes" is Pink Floyd Ummagumma, but it also plays and rips fine. Way before I bought a computer I used to record my CDs onto video tape using my Sony HiFi VTR. I still have tapes I recorded 15 years ago that still play just fine and are so close to "CD quality" that you would have to know what artifacts to listen for to tell the difference.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Last sentence from article: "I'm hoping they'll hold out till that next medium gets popular, and everyone gets to buy everything over again," he says.
Anybody wonders wether they spread FUD to prepare the field for a new sales round? Remember, media industry wants you to buy the same shit over and over again, like it majorly happened when they introduced the CD in the first place.
Interesting point about the article: "Koster", who's CD collection rots away, is *not* furious, seeking for replacements or thinking about sueing the industry. No, like being befallen by fate, he accepts the damage calm like a cow, being happy that some CDs still work. And his (and the articles) bottom line, i.e. that he and *everyone* will buy over the whole stuff again someday, to me just looks like smearing the idea right into your face.
No public, common hard disk driver enforces DRM. You won't be able to play the files on multiple machines, granted,
know what? fuck that. plain and simple.
when i buy a book at the bookstore, i don't need some secret decoder eye-ring to read the damn thing. if i did, than this limits my being able to fairly use my purchased book in whatever manner i choose.
when i buy something, i buy the damn thing. when i rent, then i rent it.
don't tell me that i'm buying something when i'm actually renting it.
more and more offshore mp3 websites with awesome collections are sprouting up offering songs for as little as 2 cents a song.
sure i can sit here and say that i'm cheating the artists by illegally purchasing music online, but let's get the facts straight: in most cases, artists don't benefit from CD sales other than making their contract look good. i'm tired of handing my money over to the RIAA everytime i buy a CD.
do away with the RIAA, let the artists benefit 100 percent from music sales, and i'll go back to legally purchasing music again.