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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?
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.
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...
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).
Because just last month, I re-ripped well over 300 old CDs into a lossless format, and had 0 problems.
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.
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
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.
I've even heard it surmised (possibly here) that putting a computer program in memory for execution is technically a copyright violation. It will never be tried in court as it goes way beyond the idea of common sense (even in today's corporate controlled courts), but it could be true.
But it was tried in court (sortof) in the Federal case Mai v. Peak. The court ruled that according to the rules of copyright, technically loading a program into RAM for execution does violate copyright, partially because RAM can be easily copyable (Anything that places a program in storage that is trivially copyable is a copyright violation).
The US Congress, Orrin Hatch in particular, thought this was silly, and amended the copyright code. Section 117 of the Copyright code currently reads:
"(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.— Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful."
#2 is your backup copy provision, #1 means you can run a program without infringing it, as long as you're just running it (and not decompiling it or something else of that nature).
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.
Not only is there wear over time, non-archived vinyl tends to degrade over time (just look at vinyl flooring) -- it gets brittle AND warps. So what you really want is a platinum LP in a sealed cover (so no dust gets in) and then read it to a non-lossy digital format with a laser, after which you apply a digital transform to bring the "warmth" back. Then keep the platinum LP archived in a temperature, presure, and humidity-controlled room.
You could have googled it.
Yes, it's still a thing. Still works on modern Windows. You'll have infinitely more problems getting the things to run than you will do accessing the original CD's.
But, to be honest, there's a plethora of one-click installs of any game you can mention, legit and dubious, out there - complete with emulation and fixes for modern OS.
There's also zero point archiving something that people have ever heard of. DOOM isn't going to drop off the face of the earth but, say, some ancient obscure title that you downloaded from a random FTP site (back when that just meant "online" not "pirated") or wrote yourself - that might be worth archiving.
I find, when it comes to archiving, 50% of the stuff is absolute crap that you'll never, ever refer to again. 40% of it is mainstream titles that everyone has and that never "disappear" entirely anyway. And the 10% is family photos and stuff that only you care about (probably not even your kids will care enough to want to store them all).
Sure, if you're famous one day, maybe someone will pay for that code listing you dig out from a 20-year-old archive, but otherwise forget it.
And this is coming from someone who - in their current mail account - has email going back prior to 1997, from when I got my very first email account.
There was a story back in 2003 that talked about CD's degrading after less than 2 years.
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.