Are your CDs dying?

Commercially reproduced CDs — the kind from major music labels — are manufactured using a physical stamping on the metallized layer of the CD, which is a physical imprint on the media. Writable CDs and most writable DVDs and Blu-rays use a chemical organic dye layer that is inherently unstable and will often die within five years.

According to the Library of Congress, even commercial CDs made in the same year by the same company can have very different production processes leading to startling differences in failure rates and modes.

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The Storage Bits take

If you haven't already ripped your treasured CDs yet, now's the time! Whether you pick a lossless codec or high quality mp3, you can't rely on a commercial CD's quality to protect music you love.

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Are your CDs dying? | ZDNet

I think I'm weaning myself away from physical media lately. I love Steam and Origin, no discs there. I don't back up to CDs or DVDs anymore, I use a USB 3.0 hard drive. I own my fair share of music CDs, but I've ripped a majority of them, and most of my recent purchases have been from digital stores like Amazon or Xbox. I own DVD movies, but also subscribe to Netflix and enjoy the streaming content from there.

Now my mom on the other hand, we're still struggling with getting her cassettes to play. She has a lot of German ethnic music on tape, and now the tape deck in our stereo in the kitchen/dining room broke the other day, so it won't play tapes anymore, and the only other place where she can play tapes at the moment is in our minivan.

Hi there
Fortunately I ripped them years ago to FLAC -- funny you should mention the fact -- a couple of physical CD's I tried just wouldn't play any more !!!! didn't matter how much I tried to clean them etc.

I ripped them actually with WINAMP so all the tagging etc was fine -- Winamp uses Gracenote which IMO especially for classical music is far better for music info than a lot of the "Free Data bases" out there.

If I get a CD any more I immediately rip it -- even though Winamp isn't supplied any more it does the FLAC rip very easily.

If I need to re-create a music CD I simply use an older release of NERO (Version 8) on a Win XP virtual machine).

Actually I still create VINYLS - have some software (and hardware) that also runs on my XP VM -- people like having "personalized" vinyls as presents !!!- I did have trouble sourcing blanks but with the popularity of Vinyls again there's no problem in getting a good supply of blanks (7, 10 and 12 inch) quite cheaply from a factory in Taiwan. Seems like my XP VM isn't going away any time soon. !!!

I don't ever buy Compressed (mp3) music -- if I can't get it as WAV or FLAC then forget it. With 64GB micro sdHC cards you can use on phones etc you can get plenty of musiv in FLAC on your device -- no reason to put up with inferior sound quality -- especially if you are using decent headphones --not those hideous bud type where the poor listener hears LESS than surrounding passengers on trains / busses etc.

DVD's are also going the way of the DODO too -- I don't suppose it will be too long before those will be as rare as seeing cassette tapes.

Cheers
jimbo

Not my cds - My DVDs!!

And these days it's hard to find replacements, everything is on Blue Cheeseray now.