foxjam

I hope this is the correct forum for this question. I have some CD-R's that I got some years ago with some hard to find music on them. They played fine when I first go them but now they won't read at all on some players and on others they keep repeating every few seconds or have a digital shrill sound. Anyone else ever have this problem? Is there a solution? Thanks in advance.

Pizza

Yes. Rip em and burn new copies.

foxjam

I tried making copies on my computer but it doesn't recognize the original disc.

statcat

Yes they can. Sometimes it depends on how well you stored them or if they were poor quality to begin with.

You could try ripping them with EAC to your harddrive

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

You'll have to keep trying it in different drives until you get lucky. If you can't get them working, you're SOL.

foxjam

They are all from the same source so I suspect they were poor quality to begin with. I thought there may be something I hadn't thought of to recover the music. Looks like I'm SOL. Thanks for the responses.

Dr Mabuse

The ink in all writable media degrades. It doesn't last. You can put them in a temperature controlled safe never exposed to light, and the ink will degrade. That exactly what some engineers did a now famous test to prove the point.

If you care about something on a X(CD,DVD)-r or X-rw, re-burn it to new stuff every couple of years at least. Or store it on a hard drive or the like as a backup.

Unlike magneto optical or other optical storage, even engineers can't restore degraded ink.

mickey65

I have some CD-R's I burned 10 years ago that still play fine.

Josh-da-man

Same here.

I have a lot of CD-Rs that I stored data on from about '99 to '06 or so.

Out of almost 200 CD-Rs, there were maybe three that I couldn't completely read -- and even then it was only a couple of files that were giving me trouble, not the whole discs.

All three of the "bad" CD-Rs were PNY; the earliest ones I used were Verbatim, burned in '99, and each one was still fine about a year ago when I transferred all of the stuff on them to a hard drive.

Josh-da-man

Sounds like your discs are fucked.

Here are a couple of things you can try, but they're long-shots:

1. Try them on a few different CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drives. Some drives are better than others at reading damaged discs.

2. Try a recovery program like this one: http://download.cnet.com/CD-Recovery...-10646814.html I had some luck with this one extracting some files from a bad CD-R, one of those PNYs in my previous post.

Don't get your hopes up, though. There's a good chance your CD-Rs are unreadable.

mickey65

Just ripped and burned a bunch of songs off of a Memorex CD-R from 1999 - all the songs are still good!

rw2516

I did an opposite test once. Dug a hole in the back yard and tossed in a cd-r. Right into the dirt. Left it out there two years. Soaking rains, sub-zero temps. Dug it up, washed the mud off under kitchen faucet, played fine.
It was Verbatim.

Dr Mabuse

I once took a 20 year old CD-R, blasted it with a shotgun into pieces, collected the pieces and and burned them in a huge bonfire for a full day.

Put the ashes in the player and it played fine.

It was PNY.

technoir

heard they have a shelf life of seven yrs. but my masters still work from way back ..10 yrs ago or so

orangerunner

Several manufacturers say 25-30 years but it depends on the brand and how they are stored.

If they sat in your car for the last five years there's a good chance they won't last long.

It's a little disconcerting how we're trusting so much information to be backed up on digital devices.

Even with external harddrives, they must be used at least every six months or they are prone to seizing-up, which causes all of your data to be useless.

Spiky

Same with my digestive system. Urp.

dvd-4-life

Are CD-audio discs better than CD-data discs?

ATX

^ theyre the same disc

cd "audio" disc are coded so the riaa can get $1 off the sale

---

and yes op, most go bad very easily... dont put nothing on em thats important

use dvd-ram disc for storage if need be

Alan Smithee

CD-Audio discs are formatted to work in CD audio recorders, which hook up just like a tape deck and let you record directly to CD. CD-data discs, or any CD-Rs that don't say "audio" or "music" on them won't work in these. This was done to appease the record companies crying about their precious intellectual property being stolen, even if you're recording music you've performed yourself or records on long out-of-business labels that would never see the light of day again.

JZ1276

ALL discs go bad. Not just CD-R's. I used to keep my entire media collection on discs. Started with CD-R's, then transferred all to DVD-R's. I've used all types of discs and all types of burners yet I always had problems with them. Eventually I gave up and just stored everything on hard drives. I think I have something like 5 TB worth of data spread across 3 hard drives. Of course, all that data is backed up.

Numanoid

Boil them!

Dr Mabuse

Those aren't CD-R's or DVD-R's, which use various inks that are 'burned' or melted by a laser. Those are commercial discs in that article, which use the film mentioned in the article. I would suggest getting a refund on those discs.

Want to guarantee no one will ever get even a single bit of data off a CD-R or DVD-R again?

Boil them!

PhantomStranger

If you are very careful with how you burn them and use the correct media, CD-Rs stored in a dark room can easily last 20 years. I have CD-Rs nearly that old and so do many others. The ones you burned at 48x speed and on the made-in-India junk media are not going to last more than a few years.