Could Disc Rot be theoretically fixed if one were to strip the aluminum and lacquer layer off the disc, and apply a new one? Considering the data is stored on the plastic layer, and people can remove the aluminum easily at home, is it feasible? Someone online owns an album of which one copy is known, and it suffers from very severe disc rot, and the artists information is not known. Would it be a good idea to attempt to get in touch with this person and see if a chemical process such as this could be done, or is it a lost cause? I know a lot of people say disc rot is permanent, but someone brought this up on the Steve Hoffman music forums as a potential solution, and it really got my gears moving. If anyone who knows more about the physical format itself and is willing to shed some light on my theory, please let me know.

Not sure, but that sounds like an interesting fun experiment to try! Give it a shot and let us know how it goes!

I have thought of this before when "disc rot" comes up, that when a disc "rots," the data is still there, but unreadble. Though I was thinking more along the lines of players that could the read data through a process other than lasers.

Stripping the lacquer and aluminum off of a CD and replacing it seems like a really precise and tedious process, and not worth the time and effort to save a CD. You would probably need to some kind of chemical wash or immersion to strip off the lacquer that wouldn't damage the plastic, though I have no idea what kind of chemical that would be. Probably wouldn't be too difficult to remove the aluminum, and it would probably come off with the lacquer. The replace the reflective aluminum layer and lacquer.

Just out of curiosity, what was the "one of a kind CD" and the story behind it?

If I owned a one of a kind CD, I'd make both CD-R copies of it, and rip lossless digital files (FLAC, WAV)

Oh, and if you do try this, buy some cheap CDs from a used store to try it out on first...

Well it was a CD found in an Oxfam shop in 2016 by someone online. They made a lossy rip to MEGA and that was really it. It's called Panchiko - D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L

It's an incredibly damaged sound, likely caused by exposure to sunlight in the store it was sold in and probably recorded onto a home CD-R. The year allegedly gives it as 2000. (No it's not a death metal album, that's just the title of it.) I've had a lot of people approach it with skepticism, and considering the person who originally posted it online has the only known copy of the album, there's no way to know if the disc itself can be recovered in any way. Some people on Reddit don't believe it to be genuine disc rot, but it makes a lot of sense considering the likely conditions it was stored in. Still, 16 years is still pretty short...

I doubt a damaged CD-R would be recoverable since they aren't pressed, and there isn't an aluminum layer. The data is burned into a layer of dye, so if that gets damaged, there's no physical impression of the data on the disc.

Maybe a forensic data recovery expert, like the CIA or something, could pull some data off of a gonked CD-R, but it's probably history.

Wasn't aware it didn't have an aluminum layer. It looks like one to me. Huh.

Some of my dvd-rs have these rainbow like spots on the bottom of the discs