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Your Old CD Collection Is Dying
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Adrienne LaFrance reports at the Atlantic that if you've tried listening to any of the old CDs lately from your carefully assembled collection from the 1980's or 1990's you may have noticed that many of them won't play. 'While most of the studio-manufactured albums I bought still play, there's really no telling how much longer they will. My once-treasured CD collection — so carefully assembled over the course of about a decade beginning in 1994 — isn't just aging; it's dying. And so is yours.'
Fenella France, chief of preservation research and testing at the Library of Congress is trying to figure out how CDs age so that we can better understand how to save them. But it's a tricky business, in large part because manufacturers have changed their processes over the years and even CDs made by the same company in the same year and wrapped in identical packaging might have totally different lifespans. 'We're trying to predict, in terms of collections, which of the types of CDs are the discs most at risk,' says France. 'The problem is, different manufacturers have different formulations so it's quite complex in trying to figure out what exactly is happening because they've changed the formulation along the way and it's proprietary information.' There are all kinds of forces that accelerate CD aging in real time. Eventually, many discs show signs of edge rot, which happens as oxygen seeps through a disc's layers. Some CDs begin a deterioration process called bronzing, which is corrosion that worsens with exposure to various pollutants. The lasers in devices used to burn or even play a CD can also affect its longevity. 'The ubiquity of a once dominant media is again receding. Like most of the technology we leave behind, CDs are are being forgotten slowly,' concludes LaFrance. 'We stop using old formats little by little. They stop working. We stop replacing them. And, before long, they're gone.'" You can donate CDs to be tested for aging characteristics by emailing the Center for the Library's Analytical Science Samples. I haven't had much trouble ripping discs that were pressed in the 80s (and acquired from used CD stores with who knows how many previous owners), but I'm starting to get nervous about not having flac rips of most of my discs.
Fenella France, chief of preservation research and testing at the Library of Congress is trying to figure out how CDs age so that we can better understand how to save them. But it's a tricky business, in large part because manufacturers have changed their processes over the years and even CDs made by the same company in the same year and wrapped in identical packaging might have totally different lifespans. 'We're trying to predict, in terms of collections, which of the types of CDs are the discs most at risk,' says France. 'The problem is, different manufacturers have different formulations so it's quite complex in trying to figure out what exactly is happening because they've changed the formulation along the way and it's proprietary information.' There are all kinds of forces that accelerate CD aging in real time. Eventually, many discs show signs of edge rot, which happens as oxygen seeps through a disc's layers. Some CDs begin a deterioration process called bronzing, which is corrosion that worsens with exposure to various pollutants. The lasers in devices used to burn or even play a CD can also affect its longevity. 'The ubiquity of a once dominant media is again receding. Like most of the technology we leave behind, CDs are are being forgotten slowly,' concludes LaFrance. 'We stop using old formats little by little. They stop working. We stop replacing them. And, before long, they're gone.'" You can donate CDs to be tested for aging characteristics by emailing the Center for the Library's Analytical Science Samples. I haven't had much trouble ripping discs that were pressed in the 80s (and acquired from used CD stores with who knows how many previous owners), but I'm starting to get nervous about not having flac rips of most of my discs.
Please proof read proof read!
"you may have noticed that many of them won't play won't play."
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Vinyl is still fairly superior for physical archiving
And with shared backups I don't even need to upload all of them - I just use the backups of others in case I need to restore!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
> you may have noticed that many of them won't play won't play
I see what you did there..
Apparently this post was transferred on a CD before being published.
As if this couldn't have worked out better for those pining for a DRM future.
Are we licensing music? Truly? Then if I show that I bought this album in 1985 am I licensed to download the song?
Oh.
A winner is you!
10 years ago I ripped my collection to FLAC, set the read-only bit and never looked back.
Now when my MP3s get fucked*, I just resample from the FLAC version.
* Technical term. There was a ulitility called "unfuck" that would repair the MP3
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Rip them to your HDD and store them in the cloud(s) as a backup.
Give me a break here. Assuming the laser isn't powerful enough to melt the foil pits, the type of laser in my CD player is going to make no difference to the media life whatsoever. It might be that the mechanism that holds the disk in place may be better or worse, but a read laser? I'd be more concerned about oxygen getting between the sandwiched polycarbonate and attacking the foil or issues with the hub than I would about the read laser's quality or type.
I have a box of CDs somewhere. Anytime I want to listen to something I usually just download it off BitTorrent. Faster than ripping the CD and I can do it all on my phone.
It's fortunate that the recording industry has never made a fuss about people backing up their CD collections.
Oh, wait...
why would you keep music on a cd?
Under usual copyright terms you should be able to legally download the .flac version of any CD you own as a personal backup. Hell, just throw out the bloody CD, FFS!
Netcraft confirms it!
I rip my CD with Exact Audio Copy to FLAC and/or use iTunes and rip to Apple Lossless.
These days Amazone has "InstantRip" so I can immediately download and listen as 256 kbps .mp3s are "good enough" for most music.
I ripped my whole collection to mp3 years ago.
Recently during a move to a new computer I discovered that many of my songs had been corrupted from years of moving without any check-sums to validate the copies (just drag a folder from finder window to finder window or explorer window to explorer window, etc).
I had to go back and re-rip most of my collection (this time to flac).
"I'm starting to get nervous about not having flac rips of most of my discs."
It's been known for over a decade that common consumer grade cd's deteriorate - although much slower than home burned discs. I originally read that they would last 10-15 years, some of mine have lasted longer but I know it's only a matter of time. I make an immediate backup in flac of all cd purchases. It's the only way to be sure ;)
I go by this general rule:
Home burned = 3-5 years before useless (sometimes closer to 1 year!)
Store bought = 10-20 years
Is it really worth sourcing your old CD? Even as a disliker of Apple, I hear that their little utility which matches your library up with theirs, then allows you to download higher bit rate versions is a gem. It is a nominal fee, but you can get much higher quality than that old CD had anyway. CDs aren't exactly a gold standard in audio quality here!
...the quality of the CDs and whether they were factory or home made since I have some factory made ones from the mid- to late 80s and they are fine.
I am no longer familiar with this medium.
My CD collection features such gems as "Microsoft Windows 95", "Turbo Tax Deluxe 2003" and "The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis"
They're used to books sitting on shelves for centuries, and they want to be able to do the same thing with CDs. The idea of converting their entire collection to a different physical medium every 5 years is alien to them.
Because just last month, I re-ripped well over 300 old CDs into a lossless format, and had 0 problems.
I have some music CDs from the 1980s and play them from time to time- on my old 1980s Phillips-Magnavox player. I wonder if the player / laser tech in newer players is the problem? Or is causing the problem? Maybe the laser is focused better now and burning the media a little each play? I'd love to try a degraded CD in my extremely well made vintage player. (I do have many new players and burners too.)
If the media is "rotting" in some observable way then obviously the media is the problem. Maybe the storage temps, humidity, etc?
I have some data CDs I burned in 1994 and they still read. Different tech. than is used now.
Regardless, sadly the CD outlives any hard disk by far (except my really old 1980s and early 1990s disks that _still_ work.) So I guess I'll rip my favored audio CDs to flac and store on the 1990s hard disks.
I have a half-baked theory that, to a rough approximation, the physical size of a bit and the amount of energy put into creating it is roughly correlated to the length of time it will last. Stone inscriptions, or baked clay cuneiform? Big bits, high energy, long life. CDs, or 148 Gb/in^2 tape media? Small bits, low energy, short life. There are ways to create big bits that are short-lived (e.g. drawing figures in the sand on a beach), but in general, a small bit cannot be made to last longer than a big bit given the same process and energy inputs.
You might say, "but look at highly-conserved DNA sequences!", to which I would answer, think about how much energy has gone into preserving them over hundreds of millions of years.
Another problem was found years ago. The ink used on the label side actively ate away at the disk. I believe there was a lawsuit in England to do away with it there, as they saw it as intentional obsolescent technology, designed to gouge the consumer. It was designed to destroy the disk after 10 - 20 years.
I'm pretty sure CDs last longer if you don't scratch them. My collection is about 150 factory-pressed discs worth, and maybe another 25 CD-Rs from various local bands. Every last one still plays, including the ones I've found in the $0.99 bin at the local music store (yes, they still exist!). I'm a bit concerned about the CD-Rs, but I have all those ripped to 320kbps mp3 (good enough, considering the recording source on most of those).
But do you have the boot floppy that goes with that Windows 95 CD and do you have the floppy drive for that boot floppy? If not do I have a deal for you.
People with LaserDisc movies started learning about disc rot the hard way about a decade earlier than people with audio CDs. LaserDisc movies store video using an analog PWM scheme, so any defect in the pits and lands of a disc show up as snow in the video.
Audio CDs, being a digital format with error correction, have the benefit of the digital cliff effect to mask minor defects. So it takes more significant rotting of the reflective layer before the player exhibits playback errors.
Luckily, audio CDs can be ripped to lossless formats such as FLAC, WavPack, Monkey and the like, so making an exact archival copy is possible. Ripping tools such as Exact Audio Copy assist in that effort by examining the quality of your rip (drives can mask error when ripping audio CDs) against a database.
I'm sure that DVDs will also start to show disc rot in time. Tools such as CloneDVD can make an exact ISO image that you can archive as well.
But LaserDiscs don't have that ability. At best, you can capture an exact copy of the PCM digital audio via the SPDIF output, but the video will always be a best effort when captured from composite or Y/C component. And with so many discs showing rot these days, it is probably too late to save them.
I have CDs going back to the 1980s which still play. This article confirmed my suspicion that they will not last forever and I don't want to spend the $$$ to replace my 400+ CDs with another media that the record cartels control like BluRay with the movie cartels. When the mp3 format came along, I found an encoder (RazorLame) that did an excellent job of maintaining the fidelity of my CDs so I proceeded to rip my entire collection. I heard some horrid fidelity mp3s on filesharing sites due to bad encoders so I don't download music nor do I upload my rips. The original CDs are now backups which are ripped to lossless and lossy formats. I'm covered in case those CDs start dying, and I also have redundant backups on different media other than disc platter technology in case my mp3 collection gets hosed. The record cartels hated mp3s but copyright law permits personal backups and there has been no legal case or precedent against personal backups.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Kneel Old.
Just buy another copy!
if you know you really (i mean really!) purchased a CD years ago, shouldn't that make it ok to download the same CD in FLAC or 320vbr from your fav pirate site??
i was/am a huge Who fan, and think Quadrophenia is simply epic...it was, in fact, the first CD i ever bought back in 1984...doesn't that mean I purchased the right to the content forever?
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Encoder delay isn't as rigidly defined for MP3 as it is for Vorbis. Because it's defined for Vorbis, decoders can correct for it. Unlike ripping to .mp3, ripping to .ogg should allow true gapless playback.
Two years ago I ripped (to FLAC) about 1000 CDs my wife and I had collected since the early 90s.
The only ones that wouldn't rip were the ones that had deep scratches on them. We still have the CDs in our posession and still buy new ones and rip them to FLAC when they come into the house.
Seems like a sound plan, they are backed up and uploaded to Google Music, too, so we can listen to them anywhere
This is perfect for the industry. It means everyone has no choice but to buy everything again in The New Format! That has always been the industry's model, so I have a hard time seeing this as anything but intentional.
Even as a disliker of Apple, I hear that their little utility which matches your library up with theirs
If the record label hasn't chosen to make its works available through that utility, too bad.
you can get much higher quality than that old CD had anyway
It's not like you could hear any of that quality. In practice, properly dithered 16/44 is enough to cover the entire painless range of human hearing. Or are you referring to serious mastering errors in the original CD, such as those induced by the loudness race?
I had a collection of somewhere slightly over 250-260 commercial music CDs (about half of which I sold off last year o various online web-sites who bought used CDs).
The sites doing the buying were extremely picky (to the point where they'd refuse to pay for a disc, even if it was the exact album they said they wanted, if its ISBN number didn't match the exact one they were after), and I was billed for replacement jewel cases in several instances, simply because the ones I provided with the CDs had small cracks in them.
Not a single disc I sold them was refused or returned for failure to play or for skipping though.
Meanwhile, I've had absolutely no issues playing any of the remaining discs in my collection. (I had to re-rip many of them just a few months ago, when I discovered a lot of the MP3 rips I made years earlier had some issues.)
What I can say, though, is, I've been very good about always putting my CDs back in the jewel cases whenever I finished playing one, and they all sit in a big, revolving CD storage tower in the house. I have to wonder if some of these complaints of "edge rot" and "bronzing" of the media and so forth are with discs people left sitting in hot cars in the summer, didn't put back in the cases often, etc. ?
>Library of Congress is trying to figure out how CDs age so that we can better understand how to save them.
Here's a idea, if you must be stuck in the 1990s with physical media, just rip the CD to a media server when you get home. It only has to last long enough to get it home and copy it. That or just subscribe to Spotify. Being able to pick just about any song wherever you are is far superior to a music hoard.
The first CD I ever bought was Bob Dylan's _Real Live_ back in 1984 --- still plays fine.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Unless your CD jewel cases and tower are hermetically sealed, oxygen can still get in there and potentially cause problems.
There are also other drawbacks. Reviews I've read have said they sound "thinner", and there is speculation that while the laser will not deteriorate the vinyl in the same way as a needle there is still wear over time.
I haven't had much trouble ripping discs that were pressed in the 80s (and acquired from used CD stores with who knows how many previous owners), but I'm starting to get nervous about not having flac rips of most of my discs.
Don't worry so much! The music industry has your back. For a small fee (equivalent to the current price of the media), they will provide you with the media that was lost.
Ok, so we all know how to rip our music CDs, hopefully to lossless format.
How about CD-based video games? Long ago I used Daemon Tools to create a virtual CD drive so I didn't have to break out the CDs to play a game; is that still a thing?
I still have King's Quest II and Ultima III on original 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disks. I'll bet those don't work anymore.
This is why some government agencies require you to submit materials that will be archived on special gold-coated archival cds. They're much more expensive, but the gold slow oxidation way down so that they'll last a much longer time.
Heh, I like the "firstworldproblems" tag.
You would have to be pretty naive to have gone all this time believing that CDs would last forever. Sure, all the salespeople back in the 80s and 90s told us this, but they only knew what they had heard or been told, and to be fair, they were drawing a comparison to casette tapes.
I don't know anyone who has a CD collection, who has not ripped them to some sort of digital format. True, if they were ripped to mp3s there was some loss, but most people couldn't tell you the difference anyway. I know I can't tell a difference. My hearing just isn't that sensitive I guess. I also can't tell much of a difference between Pepsi and Coke.
But yes, thank you Ms. Adrienne LaFrance for informing me that CDs deteriorate. However, it is not necessary to point out the blatantly obvious; pointing out the merely obvious will suffice. And I am SO happy that the Library of Congress is spending lots of taxpayer money studying this problem. While they are at it, they may want to investigate why metal corrodes and why bananas turn brown.
Proverbs 21:19
It's not so much the frequency response range as it is the richness and depth of the music. I can tell the difference between (16/44 CD) vs (24/96 DVD-A). Now when you start getting above that (blu-ray audio 24/192) it sounds great but side by side with a 24/96 file I don't think I could distinguish the two. The loudness war has resulted in over compression where the dynamics have been squashed out of the recording. This often results in distortion, but can also manifest in no distinction between instruments; very flat and blah. That's going to sound like crap no matter what resolution it's in.
MP3 is absolute garbage. Everytime I see someone talking about how great MP3s are and how they can't tell it apart from a CD I imagine them listening to it through 2" computer speakers, or radio shack headphones. On a decent system it's night and day.
Unless your CD jewel cases and tower are hermetically sealed, oxygen can still get in there and potentially cause problems.
Wait, yours isn't?
Harsh conditions almost certainly exacerbate the issue, but edge rot and other issues will eventually happen to even the best-kept collection. Media deterioration has been a known issue with CDs for many years; nobody's collection is safe indefinitely. That's why the Library of Congress is so interested in researching the problem.
Most of the music I listened to in my youth was pop garbage anyway. Haven't listened to 90% of them in a decade. Does anyone know of a eco-friendly way to dispose of them? I'm guessing there's no way to recycle CDs or DVDs.
Exact Audio Copy with the original SCSI Plextor CD readers, MD5 checksums (with a script to create and check those), duplicated over multiple hard disks. Worth noting, I could run multiple instances of EAC concurrently without interference with three of those Plextor SCSI drives on an old single-core dual-thread Dell without any problem.
If only we were purchasing a license for the content, and not the media itself, this wouldn't be a problem. Bad disc, or disc got stolen? Pay a nominal fee (50c?) for a new one. Want to sell your license? Find a way to let the DRM allow it. Want to 'rent' or 'pay-per-play' rather than own the media? Use the appropriate license. When new media technology comes out, we should not have to pay to replace our libraries.
Well, How about ripping and transferring all that music to an M-Disk (Blu-Ray) They claim up to 1000 years, and then you could save space.
http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/
I must be missing something: ripping to FLAC means in most cases storing the result on magnetic media rather than optical. That should be definitely worse in terms of long term archival quality. Also, I have been looking into optical storage for long-term archival purposes (for documents - not music - way back in the late 90s), and at the time it seemed that optical was the best choice, definitely better than magnetic, and comparable to paper but a lot denser. And the culprit (so I learned at the time) was not (only) oxygen, it was oxygen compared with moisture, as the things would just mold. So with my dated knowledge, keeping them in jewel cases in a cool dry room should make optical still a lot better than magnetic.
New CDs are more prone to physical damage - the data layer is right under the label laquer. Older ones sandwiched the data layer between multiple layers of plastic and I think it's these ones I've had fail.
Never had one of those "sandwiched" ones, must be pretty rare. All CDs I own are of the label laquer - data layer - plastic variety.
BTW and slightly off topic, DVDs have the data layer between two equally thick layers of plastic. So they should be fairly resistant to physical damage. Not that I intend to try ;-)
C - the footgun of programming languages
What about Bit Rot? The solutions people are suggesting here tend to be storing on another media. The problem is very basic - nothing lasts forever. Hard drives fail, and even if backed up on multiple hard drives, bit-rot will be a problem. Not even most RAID arrays address bit rot.
I can tell the difference between (16/44 CD) vs (24/96 DVD-A).
How do you know you can tell the difference? Can you tell even under ABX testing conditions? If so, then you have golden ears, and hydrogenaudio wants to hear from you. ;-)
There was a story back in 2003 that talked about CD's degrading after less than 2 years.
This will probably not prevent bitrot, but is just an additional trick. There was a document describing how some kind of data archival library stores their CDs. They recommended to store them vertically. During a very long time span, it could be possible that the discs will warp slightly if stored horizontally.
I have a bunch of CDs, but I never play them. Whenever I want to hear a song, I just download a copy. This should be okay, since I've already paid for the CD.
I have about 500 studio pressed CDs dating all the way back to the freebies that came with my first CD player (one of the very first Sony models, a CDP-200) back in 1983.
Last year I re-ripped them to flac using dbPoweramp. A few of the 500 had issues due to physical scratches which I was able to handle by buying replacements off Amazon Marketplace. NONE had problems from general bit rot. The 1980's vintage CDs all ripped bit perfect according to the track checksums.
Now maybe you would have a problem due to some of the fungi that are known to attack CDs in tropical climates but I bet if you are like me and kept your CDs in a temperate zone air conditioned home you are fine, and will remain so.
By the way, NONE of the other media I have dating back to the 1970's is usable. Even the LPs are no good - worn out long ago.
Good luck trying to maintain bit perfect rips for 30 years.
How about we make the copyright holder responsible for providing suitable replacements as part of their copyright renewal process. It would be preferable to require a new stamping off a master every 5-10 years and provide identical media replacements - certainly to the Library of Congress and other designated archives (CD for CD, Book for book, VHS for VHS). I could see some wiggle room where digital downloads of equal or greater quality be made available to consumers.
Even if we say fuck the consumers, the copyright holder should certainly be responsible to provide replacements to archives as part of the copyright registration. I would see such as minimal evidence for copyright enforcement.
For the price of two CDs you can get most if not all of you music into the Cloud at a high bitrate.
That's why I play my CDs on a turntable with a shark tooth for the needle.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
When CDs first came out in the mid-eighties, we were promised that:
a.) they'd sound better, and
b.) they'd last forever.
I was an early adopter, but by the mid-nineties, I'd figured out the hard way that neither were true. At least, not if you had a proper hifi.* Thank god, I kept all my records! By 1995, I traded-in all my CDs for more records, and have never looked back. I am very grateful the rest of the world seems to be catching up. There was a short period when I thought records would cease to be made.
I have many records that are thirty, forty, and fifty years old, and play perfectly. I had always taken care of my records, and did the same with CDs. Yet, my CDs, no matter how carefully I handled them, would always end up skipping, or making weird noises. With the advent of high(er) speed internet and the MP3, and later, better file formats, it always shocks me to hear that anyone buys CDs anymore.
*If you have less than a couple thousand dollars to spend on sound reproduction, you are definitely better off going with digital. With a $500 turntable/cartridge setup, you're gonna continue to wonder why people say records sound better.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
Then if I show that I bought this album in 1985 am I licensed to download the song?
Oh.
Of course you can. That's what iTunes Match does. (And like all iTunes music downloads, there's no DRM.)
https://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/
Nice try on spying on us in an innovative way, but 0 for effort.
I ripped all of my CDs to FLAC using EAC along with each album's CUE sheet. I then store the FLAC on DVD media and the MP3 on my computer. The oldest one is about 10 years old now. All of the original discs are in storage. This does remind me that it's probably close to that time to migrate from DVD to Blu-Ray.
I don't store the FLACs on a hard drive because even magnetic media will degrade over time if not refreshed. I do store digital copies of my movies on my hard-drive but I'm constantly upgrading the drives where my movies are stored every few years for more space.
I buy MP3s (Amazon) for single songs that I like but I still buy compact discs for music that I really enjoy and want to keep an archive. Plus, the sound comes out better if I rip it myself and I like having the physical media. If nothing else, it's physical proof that I bought the music.
As soon as I had a machine that was capable, I started ripping all of my CDs to uncompressed digital format. Shockingly I've managed to get my rips to survive from 1997 to today thanks to good practices in backups and fault tolerance.
Does anyone remember when CDs finally went 100% DDD? Most of the CDs I got in the 80s were AAD, and some ADD in the mid 90s. I haven't bought a CD in a great many years and have long since disposed of the ones I had... so I don't remember when DDD finally became the norm..
We were told, back when, that CDs had an indefinite lifespan -- essentially permanent.
I remember having talks with the University of Illinois' preservation librarian at the time. He had a much dimmer and less optimistic view of digital media.
One more time, with feeling. Some random gives anecdotal evidence of CD decay, without any information on how these CDs were stored. Were they in an archival setting? Most anecdotal evidence suggests CDs do not decay. My experience has been all my CDs, both commercial and burned, are fine. The only bad ones I've had were really cheap ones. (Some had the backing peel off.) But every year or so we have another filler article that out-and-out says all CDs are rotting and decaying.
And I have stuff dating back to the 80s. Even the ones which were abused at parties are ok.
I don't understand, I've got many CD's from late 80's and early 90's and all just play without a problem..
I used a green magic marker on the edges.
No sig, sorry.
Check out M-Disk. They have solved the long term storage issues with copied CD, DVD's. Pricey but worth it for genealogy, priceless collections, etc.
I don't think I've ever seen a CD / DVD (production, or that I've burnt) not work until it's literally destroyed. If you don't scratch them - which is easy to ensure, just put them in a nice case either jewel case or soft-cover - then they just keep working. I can still read CD's that I've burned that are over 10 years old - and people always say that CD-R's, especially the cheap CD-R's that I use, deteriorate quicker than normal CD's.
In fact, only one of them - the day I burned it - failed a checksum verification check, so I investigated (as that was very odd) and found a single byte was in error. I wrote the byte to change on a slip of paper and put it inside the case.
To this day, you can read that CD, correct that byte, and it works perfectly.
I've seen a dozen times more DVD's / CD's that I can't read from day-one because of some stupid DRM than I ever have material deterioration.
This cracks me up.
This "rot" stuff came out about Laserdiscs back in their day -- and about a year before DVDs were announced to be released. (Whew, yikes, wow, thank goodness for that timing, eh?!)
I owned over 500 of the discs at the time and visually inspected many for -- well, I don't know what I was looking for, but they all played fine when I used them and they likely still play fine today.
This pattern of news disinformation appears whenever a "new study" about the dangers of the latest type of artificial sweetener or NSAID hits the public. Danged if a newly designed type doesn't show up within a year. Halleluiah, praise (insert your deity here). But apparently, this is the state of today's industrial warfare.
In the case of CDs, check back a year or so from now and see if a new type of product has replaced the CD, or that CDs and DVDs are not even being made anymore. Hollywood is adept at seeing how many times they can get you to buy the same product and it's probably time for the next cycle of "cash grab" to occur -- the hurt put on CDs is well known and studies say the general public does not have Blue Ray fever, so they're about ready to squeegee windshields at traffic intersections.
I'm less concerned about "rot" (has anyone ever seen "rot" -- maybe we can make a new penicillin from it? or an anti-virus?) and more puzzled about people stuck in the 70s, 80s & 90s still listening to THE SAME PATHETIC DINOSAUR BANDS that were never really good in the first place, but benefit from 40+ years of incessant Hollywood radio brainwashing.
Obviously, it's all about the product, and I sense the rumblings of a new one coming through the pipe, one that costs othing to deliver.
CDs were originally developed by Sony while DuPont was involved for the "lacquered" coating over the aluminum substrate. If DuPont made it, it was definitely more than sufficient, knowing their business product ethos as I do. This material is likely as good as encasing digital media in Amber and will be around when our sun goes supernova.
That day, people on Saturn will stop and say, "What's that smell?", which will be our landfills toasting AOL CDs and the like. And maybe my old laserdiscs, too. I need an Advil just thinking about it...
Lesson Being: Digitize that shit as soon as possible and just keep enough backups with enough ECCs to keep transferring those digital copies perfectly to new media.
HAND.
There is a disk that writes permanently. They claim it will last a thousand years:
"The unique materials used in the M-DISC requires a new disc drive technology to engrave data permanently. The M-DISC Duplicator have been designed and optimized to work with M-DISC as one to etch data into the permanent synthetic stone layers within the M-DISC. Archival-quality DVDs are known to randomly fail leading to permanent data loss."
If you still have the necessary hardware and software to read it you should be okay.
http://www.amazon.com/LG-Elect...
http://www.amazon.com/M-DISC-4...
Looks interesting for time capsules.
Should archive that data in a more reliable format
Hence why you make backups in multiple places. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Don't i recall that these disks were advertised as having shelf lives of 100+ years? And that they were fantastic archival mechanisms... and now we're finding out that they only lasted 10% the rated time
This site says 50-100 years; http://searchstorage.techtarge...
Though the government only thought they'ed last last 2-5 years here... http://www.archives.gov/record...
Damnit I'm still using my 300 hours on AOL. If the CD stops working I won't be able to get on the Internets any more!
Yes, FLAC sounds better. But frankly, under 90% of my listening conditions I cannot tell the difference between FLAC and an mp3 ripped at 320. If I am listening on my "main kit" (audiophile gear costing thousands) I can hear the difference. But I don't usually listen to that kit. I'm usually listening to extremely good, but much smaller and less broadly ranged speakers ( (Genelec 5 inch) hooked up to my laptop and playing at fairly low volume. I've tested it, blind folded with a friend at the helm. The differences are impossible to tell. So, as a consequence, I ripped everything as FLAC to a drive for my audiophile kit, but I have more music on my mp3 drive, and it gets a lot more use.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
It is absolutely our right to protect our digital music and data licenses by backing up our volumes for just the purpose of preserving our licensed music and data. Clearly, because of this degradation of media types, we should be able to make multiple copies throughout the indefinite licensing period on multiple platforms. It is only logical that we protect what is ours to keep.
Medical grade or archival grade cdrs tend to burn slower hold up longer.
CompUSA (retail location) sold store brand CD-R and DVD-R discs that were top and bottom plastic layered, the printed labeling on top almost feels like an extremely thin felt. I've got at least a dozen CD-Rs (roughly half music, the other half *ahem, tsk tsk* mostly fps games) from the mid-late 90s that I burned in college still reading like a champ.
You're dying too.
So forget unimportant crap like CD collections and get outside and LIVE while you can.
Many CD's made in the 80's sound terrible anyway due to the A/D conversion that was available at the time
Maybe an electron tunnelling high res scanner to take a photo of the data layer. Then write software to "read" the disc and archive the ISO. Simple
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Thu 5/15/2014 8:48 am. In the last few months, I MP3ed about 30 gigabytes of *my* CDs -- 338 CDs -- which I started buying a few years after the thing was introduced in the US at any rate; co-shoppers still asked what they were when I bought the first few. One or two failed to digitize; 3 or four required cleaning, with hand cream. I have, however, noted *many* failures of *some* CD players to *play* them. ... And I hope they're not confusing CDRs with CDs, as the illustration at http://www.theatlantic.com/tec... suggests.... -- jgo * owenlabs.org
Create digital masters on hard disk with Gnome CD Master : https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/ap... also on 13.10 here : http://ubuntuforums.org/showth...
Record producer Steve Albini has been warning about the unknown lifespan of CDs for quite a while now, advising against keeping any valuable recording or data solely in this format.
So much for that lifetime warranty...
Some years ago, I wrote an extensive piece for a major computer magazine about disc rot and, in the process of doing so, interviewed a # of experts in the replication industry. The issue is far more complex than is presented here. DVDs seem to be far more susceptible because of their physical construction (two bonded layers of plastic, v. single plastic w/multiple coatings). The "rot" generally occurs when something breaks the seal that protects the reflective layer (usually aluminum) from air. This can happen because of improper handling, such as flexing the disc too far when prying it out of the wrong kind of jewel case. That's one reason why you don't want to store DVDs in CD cases. Also, in the early days of DVDs, discs manufactured at what appeared to be one or two particular (European) plants were apparently vulnerable to spontaneous disc rot. These discs might sit on your shelf for two years unopened, and when you took them out of the box, they would be covered with dark, unplayable splotches. Those initial cases garnered a lot of publicity, but appear to have been a transient phenomenon.
Replicated CDs seem to be mostly impervious to such problems, so long as you don't bend them in half, step on them repeatedly, or leave them in a hot car. CD-R and DVD-R react completely differently and there have been reports of recordables spontaneously becoming unplayable. It's hard to figure out the extent or credibility of this problem, though. Many times, a paper label affixed to a CD or a too-sharp felt-tip pen is the real root of the problem (The label side of a CD is far more sensitive than the data side; the label-side coating is 1/3 the thickness of a human hair). And of course, you should never, never, never put a paper label on a DVD.
So the bottom line is that replicated CDs, used & stored under even halfway reasonable conditions, seem to be very reliable storage media for at least decades. CD-R & CD-RW are probably less reliable, but it's not clear just how much less. DVDs are more delicate, but they too are pretty reliable, so long as you don't bend the shit out of them or expose them to extreme environmental conditions.
Exceptions exist, but they may just be the outliers that prove the rule.
My 2c.
I discovered a few years back already, that older CDs would just rot away. Considering that one of the biggest marketing claims was that they could , in principle, last forever, it's more than a bit disturbing. A LOT of albums were reissued for a limited run during the initial CD introduction to see if they would sell, and then promptly went out of print.. *again*! Seeing as these are the most likely candidates, being the early pressings, for rot, digitizing them has developed a sense of urgency. But that's not the worst part. Most CD ripping programs have error correction that compensates for the rot, but this means you're not getting a true match of the original master. Everybody poo poo'd Mobile Fidelity's gold discs, but now it does seem that it as a well considered approach to making high end Audio CDs..
For years the companies kept telling us that "accelerated aging proved..... I told people back then, that testing gives us some indications, but proves nothing. The took what they hoped was the way CDs and DVDs ages, increased the dosage by many time and said, This we pronounce the life of your CD. They didn't know then and they don't know now, but it'd be a good idea to back up those 100 year CDs at least every 10 years. If they are already skipping at 10, you probably better go to 5. If they are skipping at 5...chalk up one more for planned obsolescence.
I know from 1st hand experience that high humidity will eat away at the CDs faster
I have thousands..I keep them in their boxes. They are in drawers or shelves and thus not getting exposed to sunlight. They all play. I never have failures. I tested 6 disks in a vehicle changer system of the vintage type in a cartridge system in the trunk of a hot car in summers and frigid winters as well for 10 years. The CDs all play including a few that I burned myself. so...What can I say? It is likely moisture is the culprit as I live in a dry climate in warm weather and winter is even drier indoors but frozen and high humidity outside. It is thus high humidity and heat that are the deciding factors.