http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor..._hi_te/disc_rot

As a compulsive reader of RSS feeds, I see so much I'd like to post in HA, but this one seemed so important ...
BTW, I wonder if anyone around HA has considered assembling a feed (or done a rollup?) of the sort of stuff HA fans like.

man!
look at that hippie destroying his cd's!

bad,bad hippie!

This news story really isn't anything new, but I always find it interesting to read the stories about this that crop up now and then.

I buy a CD new or used, first thing I do is make a disc image, then high quality MP3s. After burning a 1:1 copy of the disc image, then it's compressed with either Monkey's or FLAC depending on my mood. The original CD goes back in its case and into storage.

Doing this is just damned convenient... I can be a little more careless with the CD-Rs, and it comes in handy if my car is broken into (has happened before) or something similar. If I lose a case of CD-R backups, the loss isn't nearly as great.

i just keep my door locked at night....
car too(not that it has cd-player or cd's inside)

Once I buy a CD, I make a lossless cioy of it and the original disc is stored away-probably never touched again. It gives me a lot of peace-especially since most of the CDs I own are not available in my country and I had to buy them at very high prices. It also prevents people from pestering me to lend them my CDs. I once gave a rare, brand new CD to a friend for a couple of hours and it came back with a big scratch on it. The guy didn't even apologize-in fact, he denied he did any damage and argued that the CD had the scratch before I gave it to him . Ever since then, I do what I just told you.

Always check your CDs before lending them
Imagine that one day you give an empty case by mistake ! Will you believe your friend when he says that you gave him an empty box ?

FWIW - I have CD's dating back to 1983. I just re-ripped some of them. They are fine. But: I always store them vertically, I keep them from temperature variations and light and care for them as if they had delicate data stored on them. I grew up with LP's so it is a habit for me.

If you take care with your CD's it should be possibe to extend their lives.

L8R

I think it varies a bit based on other variables besides storage conditions. I have some very old Eric Clapton and Bill Evans discs from Japan and (west) Germany which are in perfect shape, but my original Beatles discs are faring less well despite being newer and less used.

I've got a few audio cd's ranging 15-20 years old that have no visible surface scratches and they look like new, but they have what looks like a discoloration or blushing on the read side. Perhaps these are extremely cheap or unstable early-years cd's used by the recording companies. These cd's make EAC do error correction in places like the middle of a track which is much less comforting versus seeing error correction take place at the end of a track in the silent gap.

My oldest CDs are about 10 years old, and many of the old ones exhibit the symptoms that the yahoo article describes. However, it's not any kind of rot that caused it. When I was in high school, I kept all of my CDs in a binder and kept it in the car at all times. After (not so gently) opening and closing the binder over and over, the backs of some of the CDs developed little chips. When flipping pages in the binder, the backs of the CDs on one side would hit the backs of the CDs on the other. The worst affected were the CDs with smooth, shiny backs (pre-black album Metallica CDs for example). Now I know better, and I use the originals for a quick rip and then store them away. Anyway, my point is, I haven't seen any evidence of disk-rot harming my collection, but certain kinds of wear and tear resemble what the article describes.

Useful link:

http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/bronzed.asp

Cheers,
David.

A binder is the worst way to store cds. I did basically the same as you in high school. I have alot of cd's that are borked now. Fortunatley, between EAC and a Skip Dr. I've been able to at least make a backup copy of most of them.