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Effective Optical Disc Repair?
CyberKnet writes "I have an extensive music collection on original CD media. While most of it is in impeccable condition, I have a few discs that have suffered extensive scratching through listening to the disc either via a portable disc player, or in a car CD stacker. I've long since learned the error of my old ways and don't listen to discs in those devices any more, but those discs are irreplaceable in many cases. I would very much like to be able to repair them or have them repaired to original condition, or at least well enough that I can pull the tracks off once and archive the track data. I have heard really uncomplimentary things about devices like the Skip Doctor; ranging from it not helping to it making things worse. I've heard great things about JFJ devices that are seen on the counters of most Hollywood and BlockBuster video stores, but even their consumer devices start at $250. I would appreciate any other suggestions for devices that people have had personal experience with that won't break the bank."
Clean the disk well and rip it with cdparanoia.
If legal in your location, replace bad tracks with copies from elsewhere.
Burn to new CD.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Can you elucidate further on the irreplaceable aspects of many of your discs? CD's last a long time, many were made, many remain available in catalogs, and then there's Amazon, iTunes, eBay, and your local secondhand music shop.
In fact, if the record companies are smart (admittedly the RIAA backed lawsuits strongly cast this into question) everything ever (re)mastered in digital should be available from online music stores.
If you're just trying to see how cheaply you can accomplish this that's fine, however, then it's simply a matter of cost, not availability.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
My local family video will resurface the disks with their professional grade JFJ for a few dollars. If you only have a dozen or so that need to be done that might be the cheapest, safest, and easiest way to get your disks back.
Me too -- except that I was thinking "That's not toothpaste. It's a space station."
More to the point, how many "irreplaceable" discs do you have to want to repair before $250 sounds like a good deal? What did your last cell phone cost? Your last sushi dinner?
What would the submitter sell one of these "irreplaceable" CDs for? $25? $50?
Breakfast served all day!
What happens when we have CD's with >600MB storage space? We won't have to bring our computers over to share a network!
Sneakernet has ALWAYS had much higher bandwidth than the Internet.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Blame the consumer for not liking caddies? CD caddies were annoying to use. It didn't help that you probably had one or two caddies at the most and 100s of CDs. You still had to handle the bare discs and they only went into the caddy when you were using it.
If reliability and disc preservation were the concern, CDs and DVDs could have easily been contained in a shell similar to 3.5" floppy disks. In fact this is exactly how most magneto-optical drives are - both the 3.5" and 5.25" formats are enclosed in a protective shell. As are Sony's mini-discs. Of course this would add manufacturing costs and is of very little benefit to companies producing CDs and DVDs. In fact I'd argue that it benefits content producers for the media to be relatively fragile. Lack of longevity reduces how long a given disc can be used for rental or resale ensuring additional purchases down the road.
For the record current magneto-optical drives are on par with the capacity in DVDs. Obviously they aren't very popular devices and due to cost and rarity don't offer a realistic alternative to current optical technology. The cheapness of optical media is the best defense against their fragile nature. If you care to preserve a particular disc or data, just make multiple copies.
Sometimes my arms bend back.