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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.
I've heard that rubbing toothpaste on the shiny side and rinsing with water can be effective.
Get toothpaste. NOT GEL, but regular white paste. Get a small cloth, put a dab on it, then rub it from the center to the outside in straight lines going outwards around the whole disk. When you're done, clean it off and pat it dry. Disk will look like hell, but it'll work.
I have rescued lord knows how many CDs with this technique, including console ones that were completely screwed, and even resurrected a dead DVD-RW just this past weekend using this technique.
Have had good luck using this stuff, a piece of chamois, and some elbow grease. Good on all kinds of plastics, not just CDs/DVDs.
http://www.amazon.com/Novus-Polish-Plastic-Scratch-Remover/dp/B000B4Q9Y6
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Make a few quick, gentle passes over the recorded side(s) with a common butane blow torch, of the plumbing variety. The heat slightly melts the polycarbonate plastic, causing most scratches to get filled in, and other sharp edges to be smoothed & making reading easier. Tips: 1) don't overdo it, or the plastic might warp, 2) doesn't work well with recorded media (CD-Rs), 3) first practice a couple of times with media you don't mind losing.
Toothpaste, or Brasso. I hear Brasso works the best.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Get a $5 tub of Mother's Metal Polish. It'll take out scratches in any plastic as long as you use a cotton or microfiber cloth.
It's also handy if you get a gimp DVD from NetFlix/Blockbuster and don't feel like waiting for a replacement.
Typically, you can buff down the worst of gashes in less than a minute. If you can't, then the $250 device probably wouldn't have worked either.
Since there's no way you'll use the whole tub on CDs or DVDs, you can use the rest to pretty up your silverware, brass stuff, and rub rust off things you don't feel safe using steel wool on.
If anyone recommends a home remedy (like toothpaste or baking soda paste), I would try it first on one of your not-so-irreplaceable discs.
Otherwise, you may be *very* unhappy with the results (like if you use a "whitening" toothpaste, or if your tecnhique sucks).
Reminds of an A-Team episode where someone (Murdoch?) tells Mr. T to clean his gold jewelry by putting it in the microwave. Mr. T was not amused with the results, to say the least.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I don't want to be mean, but why would anyone use original (and sometimes irreplaceable) CDs in his car? Always use copies of the originals for in-car listening.
Your skin oils and the buffing from the paper help remove or pad the sharp edges on the scratch, reducing glare from the laser. This helps the drive read the data immediately next to the damage and get more bits to process with reed-solomon, data which is usually obscured by the reflections off the damage.
I've used a fine-point sharpie to black-out a scratch, and the disc read perfectly after that.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
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."
I wonder if that works on 3.5" floppies...
Of course, 3.5" floppies are in cases, so I'll have to just squeeze the toothpaste into the case, and then use the disk drive to spread it out over the surface of the disk.
It might be worth it just for the tech support call.
Thousands are enslaved every day. A River of In
How about asking your local Hollywood or Blockbuster folks if you could run your few discs through their fancy machine?
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.
Find a store that sells used albums and CDs they will most likely have this service. This is what I do.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
...to recover tracks from compact disc: 1. insert said CD into laptop/desktop 2. see if spins/reads correctly 3. open browser 4. in the URL bar type "piratebay.org" 5. this will give you another search option 6. enter cd title and/or artist 7. ensure you have one of those illegal bittorrent clients 8. recover tracks/whole CD/maybe even a few extra tracks not on CD *if using Comcast this may take a bit longer than normal 9. RECOVERED! 10. eject and toss compact disc, flip off RIAA
Since you only license the material and do not own it, they should be able to replace the media for a nominal fee.
I second that. I've rescued a lot CDs with Disc Doctor. The only ones I couldn't save had pinholes in them. In that case, nothing will save them. Any scratched disc can be saved. Is when the printed side is damaged that the disc is unrepairable.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
Use Micro-Mesh to remove scratches from the music side of the disc. It will remove scratches that you can catch a fingernail in, as well as the minor ones. Yes it is "sandpaper", but it is a system of varying grits that are used to restore the optics of aircraft windows, etc. I have extensive experience with it, and it works great when recovering a damaged CD. http://www.sisweb.com/micromesh/
thats not toothpaste...
sigs... don't talk to me about sigs....
My in-laws run a CD repair business. (Link excluded to prevent accusations of spam.) Mostly they buy beat up junk in bulk lots, fix them up and resell them at a profit, but they can easily handle salvaging damaged collections too.
The machine they use is a professional-grade one that you can drop the most horribly mangled CDs into, and a few minutes later they come out looking *new*. Search around the net a bit, and you'll find plenty of mom-and-pop operations that will be able to do this for you for a reasonable fee.
For a more DIY approach, if you're happy being able to get the CD readable once so you can rip-and-reburn it: Try nose grease. In private to avoid funny looks, hold the CD up to the front of your nose, and give it a good wipe. Spread the grease mark out with your fingers, and notice how all the scratches are now much less visible. The nose grease fills in small scratches, and it has an index of refraction close enough to the polycarbonate to make it optically sound. I've had very good luck doing this after the whitening toothpaste trick others have mentioned. The whitening toothpaste makes a good first pass, but leaves a little haze... The nose grease fills in the haze, and makes the CD salvagable.
I have a 4 year old that listens to CDs everynight at bed time. As you can image a small child can be a little bit tough on the old SpongeBob CD. Several of her CDs became unplayable. I purchased a Skip Dr at the local Best Buy for under $20. All I can say is it worked perfectly. All of the cheap solutions presented here, toothpaste, Brasso, etc all do the same thing. They are essentially rubbing compound. The difference with using the Skip Dr is that your strokes are perfectly uniform all the way around the surface of the disk and it takes less than 60 seconds to repair a disk. If you have severe scratches or gouges none of the inexpensive solutions are going to work well. One other note; when you read a forum and somebody says that the Skip Dr left scratches all over the CD, that person didn't bother to read the instructions. As with any of the buffing methods small radial scratching may occur and is normal, your player will ignore it.
If you do use EAC, use the IMG mode. That way you'll get a full rip of the CD exactly as it is, complete with correct pre-gaps and everything.
This guy's the limit!
Yeah, but then you'd have to LISTEN to it to find out if your repair worked...Then you'd have to find a way to repair your ears!
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
We have kids, so I've seen a LOT of this between the movies, Xbox games, CDs, etc. I tried the commercial dr-fix-it products and found they were weak at best and only useful for removing the faintest of scratches.
What I did, which carries some risk (with great power...) was go to my local Home Depot/Lowes and purchase:
* bench grinder ($35)
* buffing wheels, high/low density ($20)
* plastic rouge paste ($5)
* plastic polish paste ($5)
After putting the buffing wheels on the grinder, I took one of my worst discs which was scratched beyond belief. I think the kids left it on a table covered with sand and then sat on it and moved it about.
Anyway, start with the low-density pad and some plastic polish. Only buff a section for one or two seconds at a time, keep rotating the disc. Make the buffer scrub from center to the outside edge. If the low-density doesn't work, try the high-density pad. Put the plastic polish/rouge stick against the wheel for a second and then work the disc around.
Once you think you've gotten the worst of the scratches out, finish off with the low-density wheel and the plastic polish. Wipe clean with a soft cloth and water if necessary.
I've restored 50 or 60 games and movies this way. Takes 5 - 20 minutes depending on damage.
WARNING: push too hard or move too slowly and the surface of the polycarbonate will overheat and TEAR. You cannot fix a torn surface, that disc is now trash.
Good luck.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
Perhaps I should sprinkle iron filings into the toothpaste prior to applying it to the floppy. Magnets work well on iron filings, so I know they'll work well with a magnetic medium.
I suppose the iron-toothpaste mix could get stuck in the floppy drive, but I can just pull it with a big electromagnet, like the ones they use to lift shipping containers.
Then I will be able to read the floppy disks quite well. A happy ending! :)
Thousands are enslaved every day. A River of In
Ditto. The trick to using Disk Doctor is using LOTS of DISTILLED water as a lubricant (no tap water!), and being exceptionally careful to maintain a constant speed when turning the handle. Conceptually the device is the same as the toothpaste technique above, but it does a job of polishing the tracks evenly superior to anything you can do by hand.
When done, the disk will look like you've just destroyed it, but it should be readable. IMMEDIATELY rip all the tracks and burn yourself a replacement disk. Better yet, rip all the tracks and put them on an MP3 player. CDs are passe for playing, but they're economical for distributing music unencumbered by DRM.
Several months ago there was a slashdot post that TDK has these cool coating materials for CDs, where you can drop a screwdriver on it, from the hight of a table, and it won't even scratch... It had something to do with blueray discs, that got scratched too easily...
Just don't go through all the effort just to burn it back to a cheap CDR, which will "fade" in a matter of months (personal experience...)
Also, since you actually own the CD, download the songs from emule or something, at least for a short term solution. It's perfectly legal if you own the CD. But you probably know that, since you read slashdot.
As for the car: use mp3 in someway, it really does the difference in terms of library, jitters, and waiting times...
A used cd store near me does that, it works quite well for them. I brought them 15 cds which all produced several errors in EAC along with terrible AccurateRip results to see what they could do. They fixed EVERY SINGLE CD, errors removed in EAC and the CRCs each matched no less than 20 in AccurateRip.
If I ever get the balls I will do the same :)
Yes, those analog CDs really hold the waveform better than the digital ones, man.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I'm such a nerd. I immediately thought of this as a Star Wars reference: "This is not the toothpaste you're looking for..." I was wondering how this might be considered funny, and then...
The CB App. What's your 20?
They keep arguing that we're buying a license to the music. As such, since the medium they have delivered this to you is obviously flawed (cannot stand up to a reasonable amount of use), they should be obliged to replacing the medium with a new one at their cost. Right?
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
FUD does not mean "false" or "myth" or "urban legend". The OP was not spreading Fear, Uncertainty or Denial. Stop using it that way.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
My XYL does this, and it works like a charm. Alas, with our dirty industrial-era air, the silver tarnishes up again rapidly (silver is quite chemically active). I've occasionally wondered how difficult it would be to spray-coat the display pieces with clear lacquer to keep-em bright; I suspect the answer is, "Very, very difficult if you want to get decent-looking results."
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
I thought all toothpaste has some very mild abrasive in it.
That may well be. It's just that the poster has stock in a toothpaste company that does NOT produce a gel. All you gel using people are diminishing his retirement fund, and the fact that you have a brilliant white smile, fresh breath, and no cavities is just rubbing it in.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Many DVD rental places have the $250 disc cleaning machines and will buff a disc for you for a nominal fee.
Me too -- except that I was thinking "That's not toothpaste. It's a space station."
The principle is that if you wipe radially, if grit gets trapped and you cause a scratch by accident (which will happen, even if you don't notice it at the time), it's less likely to be fatal to the data because the error gets shared between more sectors.
A 5mmx1mm scratch can completely clobber hundreds of sectors if it's circumferential, but is (with a bit of a following wind) survivable with no loss if it's radial.
Reality is the ultimate Rorschach.
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!
Whenever I need a fresh copy I just download one.
Some of the kind people out there even make a second backup copy for me and store it in BitTorrent format. I don't know their names but thanks!
No sig today...
We need to GET RID of this optical medium shit that is easily destroyed.
If you are careful with the media and the media is not junk in the first place you shouldn't have many problems. Sure, the media is not nearly as robust as other alternatives but if you stick your discs in cases when they are not in use and don't leave them in extreme heat/cold then you shouldn't have many discs get "easily destroyed".
We will be rid of optical media only if a replacement comes along that is just as cheap and easy to transport. I can mail/hand someone 8.5GB on a DVD+R DL and the media would only be about $1. I can put the disc into a cheap DVD case, put that in a CD/DVD mailer and mail it off for $2 at the most for the case/media. Optical media makes it very easy to transport a decent amount of data to someone quickly and extremely cheaply and nearly every modern computer has a CD/DVD drive so the person getting the media should have no problem reading the data. It also is great to use to get somewhat large amounts of data to a location that does not have any internet/network connection.
Another benefit is since the media is so cheap, you don't have to worry about needing to get the discs back from whoever they are given to. I can give someone ~100GB using a stack of 12 DVD+R DL's for a few bucks and who cares what happens to the discs after the person is done using them. If I gave the person a hard disk instead they would need to get it back to me or else I would be out quite a bit of money relatively speaking.
What other media can you do the same with so cheaply? The answer is none.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
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.
No, optical storage is better than magnetic because it isn't susceptible to magnetic fields. When CD-ROMs first came out, they had "caddies" that you had to put them into, before loading them into a CD-ROM drive. Keeping all your CDs in caddies kept them from ever getting scratched, just like floppy disks' plastic covers kept them from being scratched.
Unfortunately, consumers didn't like caddies. They were a bit of a pain to work with, because 1) their CDs didn't come in them, they had to provide them themselves, and 2) most people had way more CDs than caddies, so they were constantly swapping (leading to more scratches, which the caddies were supposed to protect against). Plus, the caddies were expensive (leading to problem #2). So drive manufacturers quickly abandoned caddies, and went to tray-loading drives instead.
So if you don't like the fact that CDs and DVDs are so easily scratched, blame your fellow consumers for creating this situation. The drive manufacturers sincerely tried to provide us with a better solution, but we were too cheap to use it, so they gave us what we wanted instead.
Besides, last time I checked, there's no such thing as a removable magnetic media which can store 4.7GB of data, or worse the 36GB that BD-R stores. Hard drives can do it, but they're completely sealed with no dust, and heads floating microns from the platter surfaces. Removable media drives can't replicate such perfect conditions, so the best we've seen is on the order of hundreds of megabytes, which is pathetic compared to optical media. They did have magneto-optical drives for a while, which had great capacities at the time, but they were expensive as well (both the drives and the media). I believe they used caddies too, and you know how that fared.
Face it, people want cheap, even if it's easily damaged and not long-lasting. The best thing you can do is just use optical media, and be careful with 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.
Besides, last time I checked, there's no such thing as a removable magnetic media which can store 4.7GB of data, or worse the 36GB that BD-R stores.
There is, it's called the IOMEGA REV. But it is stupidly expensive. Optical media is not particularlly reliable but it's so bloody cheap that you can get arround that by keeping multiple copies.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
you don't need boiling water to get it to work ( I don't know what temperatures are safe with those stones, though ).
Also, I believe the aluminum-oxide remains attached to the aluminum-foil.
( the aluminum-foil looks tarnished, after, iirc )
Either way, a quick buff of the de-tarnished silver, removes less silver than buffing it off does.
Cheers
Well, I have the hand-crank model, and I haven't had any bad experiences with it yet. Granted, I haven't had to use it very often; I take pretty good care of my discs. But I've had one disc which many would consider dead returned to its former glory without any problems whatsoever.
A friend of mine borrowed some CDs of mine, among them several CDR's with data on them. While returning them, the plastic bag in which he carried them broke, and the CDs fell to the floor. Jewel cases cracked open, CDs skidded all over the pavement. We're talking tarmac with crushed stone in it here, the kind of street you wouldn't want to fall off your bike on when you were a kid because you'd be plucking sand and little stones out of your knees for days. One of the CDRs became so scratched (fortunately on the good side; if it were on the back the data-carrying layer would've certainly been damaged beyond repair) that it wouldn't read anymore. I've then spent ten minutes with the scratch doctor. Afterwards the disc looked like it would be impossible to retrieve any data from it. Lots of little scratches left the surface looking like there was some kind of film on it. Surprisingly, the data could be copied off to my harddrive without a hitch though.
YMMV though, but as far as I'm concerned, it's a pretty decent product given its price.
Of course, you could always go talk to the people at your local DVD rental shop and ask them what they'd charge you to resurface your discs. I'm sure a couple of them would probably offer such a service if requested, since they so often need that same service themselves. In fact, if you don't like taking any risks, this seems like your best option.
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?