Audio CD-Rs going bad... collectors feel my pain

I noticed this a few years ago when I went back and started listening to some mixes I made in late 90's early 2000's. I noticed that the color ones, like the red, blue and black bottom memorex ones were the worst. The other thing I noticed was that most of them played fine on my home Onkyo carosel style CD changer. They just wouldn't play in my car deck or on my boombox. Computer drives were hit or miss.

i heard about this issue since back in the day, thats why i recorded everythin on Traxdata or Sony CD-Rs, green discs, some 10 years later they still play flawless..car..CD..PC.

i made plenty of mixes back then, here is one..peep game: http://www.sendspace.com/file/0rzmjc

Verbatim are good also

I'm going to have to check mine out too.

mine are the cheap maxell and i have mixes from 2000 that still play perfectly..

man, does time flies. we're getting old fellas lol......

Back in, like, 2005/2006 (sometime around that time) I thought it would be a good idea to make CD-R copies of all the CDs in my collection. I smartened up and decided that I no longer wanted to play the originals on any players anymore in fear of them getting all scratched up, and eventually becoming unplayable. So I started making 2nd copies of everything.

I only used the silver SONY digital audio blank discs because (1) I figured they were the best/highest quality blanks available, and (2) the burner I was using only accepted the ones that had "digital audio" labeled on them. I was using one of the earliest CD burner units ever released (6-disc changer & 1 tray for the blank). It burned each CD hella slow, and did a great job at correcting scratched discs. CDs that were skipping on me played perfectly fine on the CD-R copies I was making. And it was a straight CD to CD process, so the audio was lossless CD quality.

I made labels for each one all nice and neat, put them all in their own cases and stacked them all on a shelf. I have a pretty big collection of these in my closet right now. But they've been sitting there, unplayed, in mint condition for years. And just recently I took one out and popped it in my car and the muthefucka started skipping on me! I tried a few others and the same shit happened. Fuckin trip.

I ain't really trippin off it tho cause I've already ripped the unreleased/hard to find albums into high quality mp3s onto my hard drive. But it still sucks to think all that hard work won't pay off in the future.

But I think I would throw up if I couldn't rip the tracks off the ones that are impossible to find now. So I feel your pain, paul.

Yeah that happened to my Kindred album and Gata Family Clique recently.. 99/2000 cdr releases that just straight degraded. I'm sure i've got others.. For a whole local rap scene to be archived then wiped though. That's all bad. U got anyone who can sort you out rips of these? Theres a few STL fanatics on this board goin back to that era.


Good call i'm gonna have to start lookin thru em all. Fingers crossed but i think there's only half a dozen cdr releases i've not already backed up.

It's a mixed bag though.. Some you get hefty old blue discs with a paper label on like it was done in a rush - them shits work, and they play fine.. Then you get an actual silk-screened mitsumi-cdr and it's fucked!

Shit, havent been on the site for a while and just read this. I have a bunch of the 100 spindals full of CD-R's. Going to have to look into it....

happened to my Slink Capone cd which came out on printed cd-r only, it only worked in my cd/alarm clock radio but not my computer or car stereo. not sure if works in anything now cuz its been a long time since i tried listening to it. sucks cuz it's a rare cd and probably won't find it again and if i do it'll still be on a cd-r

I have a lot of these too. Last time I checked some of the ones from around 2000-2001, which was about a year ago, they all worked. But how long that's going to continue to be the case is an open question....

I've only used high-quality blanks to archive things because I've always been aware of this issue, but nobody really knows how long those will last either - after all the only way to test the claim that something is not going to degrade in 100 years is to wait a 100 years. Hopefully they do last as long as advertised but I have reasons to doubt it.

BTW, this is a general issue with all digital media - none of it is is particularly durable (hard-drives fail, CDs and DVDs degrade, etc.) because the industry as a whole is very near-term focused and works with the expectation that formats will change every few years as they have been so far. So few people pay much attention to the issue of long-term information storage except for a small group of librarians deeply concerned about it and some researchers working on exotic technologies. Hopefully, a solution appears soon.

this brings me to the question what lasts the longest of the available options? hard-drives, usb drives, cdr, dvdr?

There are archival cd/dvd's that have a guaranteed shelf life of 300 years. I use them to archive mastering projects for clients.

I have a set up that can rip audio on a degrade cd-r. Its basically an old ass analog system that converts directly to music cd-r's.

Your best option currently is probably archival-grade DVD-Rs (though those are more expensive than regular DVD-Rs), and I use DVD-R/CD-R/HD-DVD/Blu-Ray interchangeably here, there shouldn't be much of a difference between them in durability as the physical media is quite similar and degrades for the same reasons (the data density may have some effect on this but it should not be the primary factor).

I don't know how long hard-drives last but my guess would be less than blank CDs/DVDs.

Basically, you don't want to store things long-term on anything that can be easily destroyed physically. Paper was never a very good option because it burns. But it can still last a few hundred years before it degrades. Optical storage on plastic and magnetic storage are fundamentally worse ideas for long-term storage because they can degrade spontaneously much faster than paper.

Metal objects and crystals are the best options. I remember people talking about HD-ROMs back in the late 90s/early 00s which were supposed to be made out of metal:

What is HD-ROM (High-Density - Read Only Memory)? - Definition from WhatIs.com

But obviously, it's 2103 and there is no such thing on the market.

Now this sounds really promising:

Hitachi unveils quartz-based storage, data may last 100 million years - TechSpot

Hopefully it will work in practice and will appear soon so that we are able to back up our archives before they degrade...

There are. The problem is they have not been around for that long for that claim to be tested. I am really crossing my fingers they do last that long because I have several terabytes of stuff stored on such DVDs but it remains to be seen what happens in practice

I really only need it to last 50 year max. After I'm dead I don't care

...vinyl... LOL