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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
While it might suck having to pay a nickel for music off of iTunes, at least I know that my data can be backed up in a manner of my own choosing.
I have been pwned because my
They don't last 10 seconds in the microwave.
Most CDs that have come out in the last 5 years have been nothing but rot...
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)
We know CDs suck for longevity. This has been discussed on Slashdot more than JonKatz.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
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
CNN is a bit late to catch up with this...
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 music on the radio sounds worse every year?
The whole music industry may be less immoral than we've ever thought.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
It's nothing a little duct tape can't fix!
Keep the faith, share the code
The article also describes related problems with CD-Rs, CD-RWs and DVDs.
Good thing DVD -R and DVD+RWs aren't affected.
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
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.
that the billions of AOL cds in the world will eventually turn into something useful? like dust?
That is how many times you can burn a static playlist. Don't ask me why.
To make it inconvenient to mass-produce CD's from iTunes.
I write in my journal
It needs to be heard in more public media to get attention of the public. The geeks get the low-down way before the public does. I'm willing to bet much of it is to suppress public outcry...
In the mean time, this opens the doors to perhaps yet another less fallible storage method. As an open-source advocate, I'm hoping some forward-thinking scientists are already cooking something up that doesn't require DRM be an inherent part of the mix.
Oh, wait, the original article said immorTal, sorry, my bad. ;)
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.
I don't know, I was watching Princess Bride and saw a guy who was only 'mostly dead'...
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.
The CD or the copyright?
One of the things that's bugged me is that AFAIK, CSS and the like have NO provisions whatsoever for copyright expiration. I guess the ??AA can use this as a reason for never having any.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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.
Oh great....now my whole AOL free trial collection will be ruined!
Indecision may, or may not be my problem! -- Jimmy Buffett
Dan KOSTER.
is that perhaps with a soft "O", like "Coaster". I'd say so. He should change his middle name to "2000".
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
When that beard turns white he will make a great Gandolf though.
Look, all you people bitching about how we heard this already need to RTFA. This is a different type of rot, that last article was about CD-R and CD-RWs, this article is mostly about industrially produced discs, made with a stamp not a laser?
Consumers have adopted a system by which multiple redundant backups are constantly made and remade.
It's called P2P.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
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*...
You'll find 60 or 70 year old records that sound and play just fine. There is next to no deterioration of either the sleeve or the record if they're stored and unplayed. I'd imagine the lifespan would easily be hundreds of years. Sure, you get some deterioration in the form of clicks and pops but you'll never get a complete failure like a digital or even magnetic medium. Now that MP3-for-pay is coming of age, finding a stable medium is going to be a top priority for the average person. Heck, most people don't even backup their hard drives and duping CD-Rs is time consuming and wasteful.
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
NYT discovers IRC, CNN discovers CD-Rot. I'll bet the next thing that happens is that Al Gore discovers the Internet.
Seriously, though, this explains why the american congress is pushing all the ideas of the MPAA and the RIAA, they really don't know what is about to hit them. And CNN is certainly not going to tell them this time, as it seems.
I'll only count a digital medium as immortal when it can stand up the punishment my 2-year old regularly inflicts on my CD collection. Titanium platter maybe? ...
[ UNSIGNED NOT NULL ]
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 think he went the way of the Internet Stock Boom....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
But it's not iTunes' problem. Basically, all Apple cares about is making iTunes legit. By not facilitating mass production, they can claim they thier product doesn't contribute to piracy.
Once the CD is made, it's the same problem they've always had with CD copying. ie: not Apple's problem.
=Smidge=
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
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
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
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.
but Old Slashdot Stories seem to never decay.
Sure, there are hacks and work arounds...but they aren't always readily available.
For instance...I bought Battlefield 1942 and couldn't make a backup. My little sister destroyed the 2nd disc. Now I can't reinstall it. I couldn't make a backup because the original disc contained bit errors. When I contacted EA, they told me to go screw myself.
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.
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 also have a Star Trek soundtrack CD from 1985 that works fine too.
Er, I'm not sure the phrase "works fine" can ever be meaningfully associated with a Star Treck soundtrack CD. ;)
Probably the same reason regualr appliance betteries haven't got much better in the last decade. if the stuff lasts too long why would you have to buy more or upgrade to the latest and greatest? Point being: Maybe they sell poor quality CD-Rs so that you have to backup(buy more frequently) more often.
Creative Demolition
You know, you could probably ask to see the info through a Freedom of Information Act request...
Gotta love how CNN assumes that everyone is as dumb as their editors. Somehow I doubt anyone in the slashdot crowd hasn't known about the longevity problems in CDs for at least 5 years now. And yet this is suddenly "news"?
Like most things, I too am an expert in this field (CD media)
RiTEK or Taiyo Yuden or Mitsui are "semi acceptable"
CDRs use frail ORAGANIC dye prone to steady erasure and destruction from heat, light, water, etc.
All media sucks for long term archival except perhaps STAMPED glass platter cds using gold sputterred reflection. They are called "Century Discs" and you have never seen one, though they are special fabbed. They are inorganic. No plastic to "droop" no aluminum to oxidize slowly into powder over the decades. (Aluminum oxidizes in 2 millionths of one second when exposed to air but creates a semi-safe blanket of aluminum oxide a couple atoms thick and remains mostly reflective.) All cdrs are slowly rotting, but if kept cold could last a while and be readable in a "flat bed static CD scanner" in 2020 and later.
Start of Side topic #1 ; inorganic home recordable +100 year archival media:
I own "mostly inorganic" glass platter PDO media for archiving with a four and a half thousand dollar device I bought once. It's a Maxtor (Maxoptix) Tahiti-II and each blank cost over 100 dollars. But the data will last centuries under ANY HEAT and ANY atmosphere and ANY Radiation and ANY magnetism because it uses PLASMA STATE recording. A rare earth element is heated past liquid, past gas state, into PLASMA STATE by a ridiculously espensive high powered laser, and while in this state, a strong magnetic field orientates the crystals of the cooling rare earth metal into north-or south orientation. A simple low power read-only laser can use a polarizing filter to readily discern this data. It can do so centuries from now. The Library of Congress uses these 4 thousand dollar recorders, and the US military... and also myself for pleasure. Yup I stored porn on these Tahiti-II glass platter inorganic discs! Too bad the timing-tracking marks embedded in these crystal media 125 dollar platters was imprinted using a plastic marking substance instead of the official "acid etching using H2SO3F+" Magic acid.
Only magic acid can eat a beaker or mark the inside timing marks of these special multi-century media... and Phillips Dupont CHEATED ME and fucking used PLASTIC which will rot away slowly over the next 75 years depriving our future generations of my porn collection. You can buy magic acid in special containers, or manufacture your own by mixing antimony pentafluoride (SbF55) and fluorosulphonic acid (HSO3F). It has an unbelievable pka of 20 and is powerful enough to protonate saturated alkanes forming carbonium ions... and etch glass without spending a lot of effort trying to use hyperboloid 5Kw lasers on clear glass.
UI am definitely going off on a tangent and I was still talking about CD reflectivity, so I will continue...
End of Side topic #1 ; inorganic home recordable +100 year archival media:
I have visited pressing plants, sputtering plants, and even polycarb manufacturers for DVD and CDR, and taken a few 1,200 dollar a day seminars on laser head movement and design.
Refectivity in a CD or CD-ROM is irrelevant. The laser usually uses a "Quarter wave" plate and the frequency of the laser is specially selected and this rotated light has a 90 degree polarity difference (differential phase) that makes reading possible at high speeds. This is less relevant in CDR but very important in stamped media. I discuss this at length for you below a second discussion in my Side topic #2 on : CD Reflectivity Layers (not needing any metal or even being transparently covered)
Amusing Side NOTE : I am not just Mr Medical boy, Mr microbiology Man, Mr Lawyer, Mr Musician, Mr Trivia Buff, Etc... i am also Mr Computer expert and CD device consultant, and paid a couple times in my life to consult on CDR mechanism design.
The best CDRs use a special dye invented by Mitsui Toatsu Corporation (MTC), but no longer true after 2000 unless you have old stockpil
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.
the cd eating fungus
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
"The near-immortality of CDs, sometimes used as an excuse by record companies as an argument for their high cost"
I've never heard a record company state that a CD's near-immortality is a reason for its cost. Has anybody else? Can somebody provide a citation?
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
"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?
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
If you think about it, paper is relatively high tech in comparison: read/write, random access to pages, zero energy consumption, and it last at least 750 years (if it carries the little infinity symbol -- see International Standard ISO/IEC 9706 (1994) Information and Documentation-Paper for Documents-Requirements for Permanence).
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 really love the term "Fragile protective Layer"
It goes well with "Glass Bulletproof Vest".
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.
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
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.
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