DTS-CD DTS blues...

[Quadchuck]

long ago I wrote I had failures with cd's that I had put full circle labels on, they wouldn't play after 6 months to a year. So I bought Taiyo Yuden discs with label already on disc. I've been avoiding doing this...going through my discs, housed in a Pioneer 300 disc player and verifying they still play. As I feared I'm getting a high failure rate with
both after labeled discs and prelabeled discs.
I also find I didn't archive as well as I thought my original files for some artists. I do have discs that still play fine , did anyone else have this annoying phenomenon happen?

 

[quicksrt]

Printable CD-Rs are not pre-labeled, they simply have a printable surface.

All of my Taiyo Yuden discs retain a quality low-error rates after 14 to 19 years. My cheaper branded discs seem to also play and rip with few errors, but maybe not as error free as the Taiyo Yuden discs . I attribute this to using a very expensive Plextor burner very early on. This burner would write a very strong burned in track to CD-Rs.

So in my opinion, both the quality of CD-Rs used and quality of burner used, plus storage method of the discs will determine longevity and rate or errors. Discs stored in a cool dark area in clean cases or envelopes seem to play better than discs that got sunlight every day.

I am ripping concert bootlegs on CD-Rs from 2004, and 2005 at the moment. They are all consistently ripping w/o errors thank god.

 

[winopener]

I've said a lot of times, any -R technology, CD-DVD-BR, will fail: it's just a matter of WHEN, not IF.
ANY -R media has a polymer that is sensitive to light, that's how the technology works with the laser, but even after the burn process it is still sensitive to light and, being mostly a organic polymer, it suffer also natural degradation.
Back up to hard drive until you can, and then backup the hard drive too.

 

[Ranasakawa]

I'm backing up the backup hard drive as well after spending over 2 years ripping my very large CD and music digital collection.

 

[jimfisheye]

I have a fair amount of archives of past projects on Taiyo Yuden DVDRs. I think even some on CDRs from the 1990s. The ones I've tried to load back in have just worked. (Knocks on the wooden table 3 times.) Taiyo Yuden is no more since the bluray age. (They were sold. Anything with that name now isn't the same product.) Verbatim seems to have the most positive comments and that's what I've been using since blurays came about (2010?). Hasn't been long enough for anything to deteriorate yet with those.

I did have some early CDRs (not Taiyo Yuden - not just some shit brand like Memorex or somesuch... or maybe it was just as shit but I was unaware...). Would have been around 1995 with the early CDR burner standalone machines. Those all deteriorated into coasters well over ten years ago.

Those label makers were an evil malicious plot to ruin CDRs/DVDRs. It was either one of the stupidest things anyone ever suggested or malicious. If you don't perfectly center the label so it's balanced like a car tire (which is NOT possible by eye or with any simple jig), you'll trash the bearings in the optical drive. That's if it spins stable enough to ever read again in the first place. If you fell for that bad advice... Maybe you could try to carefully remove the label. You'll be inn a bod spot with this though. The "business end" of a CD or DVD is the top label side. That's the recorded material that gets etched. The bottom is plastic to protect that recorded surface. The top side is covered in only a lacquer. You could potentially rip the lacquer covered recording medium off the disc with the label if you tried to remove it. Solvents could eat into the lacquer as well if you tried that route.

I don't consider the round shiny things suitable for a music archive backup though. Restoration would be painful with a large library (feeding 100's or 1000's of discs back to a new hard drive). Always buy pairs of hard drives minimum. Primary and its backup volume. A 3rd offsite backup is recommended if you aim to be "serious" about it. The bluray backups are the "studio reels" as it were for projects here. The "important" projects get two copies and one goes offsite. All this is doing the absolute bare minimum - which I am aware of. Trying to be a studio on a shoestring budget in the age of mp3s, cheap earbuds, and indifference!

The only real solution is to keep an "active" archive. Multiple copies and occasional new backups to new drives and/or new tech as it comes along. Always keeping an eye on things. Minimum 3 copies with one offsite. Short of that... As wonderful as the digital encoding trick is to be able to clone 1:1 and preserve with zero loss. In a 1000 years after the collapse, someone will unearth vinyl and be able to play it. Any digital medium that actually survived would probably be a meaningless string of ones and zeros after the syntax is lone forgotten.

But the files from all the guitar overdubs on my last Raging Lunatics album were apparently errantly saved to the Desktop folder instead of the project folder in 2004 and thus never made it to the DVD archives. So there will be no surround remix because I was a fucking idiot! But I digress.

 

[Sonik Wiz]

long ago I wrote I had failures with cd's that I had put full circle labels on, they wouldn't play after 6 months to a year. So I bought Taiyo Yuden discs with label already on disc. I've been avoiding doing this...going through my discs, housed in a Pioneer 300 disc player and verifying they still play. As I feared I'm getting a high failure rate with
both after labeled discs and prelabeled discs.
I also find I didn't archive as well as I thought my original files for some artists. I do have discs that still play fine , did anyone else have this annoying phenomenon happen?

Back in the days of Pentium 4 & Windows XP, when I built my 1st PC, I also used those full sticker labels to make my discs pretty. And back then I was using a Denon DVD player. On rare occasion discs, mainly DVD's, would glitch. Getting an identical disc without the label usually fixed that. I am not sure if it caused media deterioration, made the disc just a bit too thick or threw it out of balance. Eventually I went to an Epson printer that let me print on white label discs. On the other hand just last night I played Basia's London, Warsaw, New York copied from LD to DVD from those early days. It also has a self stick label & plays perfect on my Oppo 105.

For those wanting the utmost in disc media longevity please consider the M Disc. Unlike regular disc media this is not made from organic AZO dyes. It does require a compatible burner. It will play back on any regular player. I have found I can put a bunch of audio / video files on this, mix and match. Many CD's can be put on 1, 25 GB disc. Maybe some players are different but my Oppo lets me browse the files easily & pick out whatever I want.

 

[J. PUPSTER]

Back in the days of Pentium 4 & Windows XP, when I built my 1st PC, I also used those full sticker labels to make my discs pretty. And back then I was using a Denon DVD player. On rare occasion discs, mainly DVD's, would glitch. Getting an identical disc without the label usually fixed that. I am not sure if it caused media deterioration, made the disc just a bit too thick or threw it out of balance. Eventually I went to an Epson printer that let me print on white label discs. On the other hand just last night I played Basia's London, Warsaw, New York copied from LD to DVD from those early days. It also has a self stick label & plays perfect on my Oppo 105.

For those wanting the utmost in disc media longevity please consider the M Disc. Unlike regular disc media this is not made from organic AZO dyes. It does require a compatible burner. It will play back on any regular player. I have found I can put a bunch of audio / video files on this, mix and match. Many CD's can be put on 1, 25 GB disc. Maybe some players are different but my Oppo lets me browse the files easily & pick out whatever I want.

Are there any "current/available" external USB writers available for this disc?

 

[Sonik Wiz]

New Egg to the rescue:

https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=m-disc+external+blu-ray+burner+drives+usb+3.0
Seemed a bit pricey to me but then I remembered I probably paid about $100 4>5 years ago for an internal burner.

 

[winopener]

For those wanting the utmost in disc media longevity please consider the M Disc. ...Many CD's can be put on 1, 25 GB disc.

AFAIK M Disc are a bit bigger than that and follow the ordinary media sizes, 4,7 dvd, then 25 50 100Gb for bluray

 

[JonUrban]

I had never heard of M-Disc! Thanks for the tip. I will have to check it out, although since I lost disc playing in the car I really haven't been burning many discs lately.

 

[quicksrt]

Kids, if a CD-R disc reads with many errors, there are things you can do to get those errors to a minimum, perhaps even rip that disc secure with no issues whatsoever.

I have three desktop computers at my desk. I have a i5 running Win 10 with a single disc DVD/CD reader, an Pent M (I think) running Win 7 with three drives in it. And an older Pent 4 running Win XP with 4 drives installed.

So I have eight (8) drives available under three different OSs. I have many times gotten lucky and found one of those drives got along with an old problematic disc, when the other drives I have just could not hack it.

The reason I have three computers on my desk is mainly for two reasons. I like to be able to rip hundreds of discs quickly, accurately, and with corrected tagging as I go. With three computers going full-on non-stop one can get through it amazingly fast. And if I hit a bad disc, I have 8 or 9 different drives to keep trying it out in. And if I fail to get a perfect rip, at least I can rip it on the drive that seemed to show the fewest errors or bad sectors as it calls them in dBpoweramp. So you go with the drive that got through it best, and then rip in "burst" mode. And sometimes the album and songs will play back with no noticeable glitches. You get a solid player even if a few errors were detected.

The other reason I have the three 'puters going is having Win XP, Win 7, and Win 10 gives me flexibility to use some programs that only perform well with a certain older OS. And my Win XP tower has connections that have all disappeared on newer computers. I actually have a HP LaserJet printer that is just beautiful and I have a couple of (new) toner cartridges for it still. It can run on XP perfectly with a parallel port, Win 7 with a parallel to USB connection, and not at all on Win 10. Other hardware too, large format scanner, and a Nikon Film scanner, must run on Win XP.

So these are some big reasons I have the older technologies (hardware/software) still purring like kittens on my desktop workstation. The ability to rip CDs three at a time is an added bonus, and the ability to find a ripper drive that gets along the best with that given disc is an added bonus as well. I am pretty much done with most of the ripping project. 11TBs of music is plenty.

Favorite software that is running on most of my machines including laptops:

Nero 6 (for disc burning, an old version that is said to be better than any later versions)
DbPoweramp (ripper and media file format converter)
DVD Shrink (DVD ripper and movie size reduction)
DVD Decrypter (works often if Shrink fails)
Tag & Rename (touch ups when you forgot to drop in some meta, or a new album cover during ripping)
GoldWave (professional grade audio editing, can record, and do some fancy edits, but I just use it to chop each song from a long album side, and maybe do fade-in / fade-outs, using Vegas 13 for the real fancy stuff like crossfades and sectional replacements)
ClickRepair (god's gift to the vinyl needle dropper)
DVD Audio Extractor (just got the latest, wow, doing my Chicago DVD-As before I sell those off)
JRiver 23 (activated on three computers)
Sony Vegas Pro 13 64bit (video editing including iPhone footage), pro level editing and can handle 24/96khz audio for those special projects)
Adobe Photo Deluxe (very old program on Win XP / 7 only, it's really Photoshop Jr. very light and does so much, I can make my own album covers and they look like real major label efforts. Adobe didn't like a cheap and light sw that did so much with photos.)

 

[quicksrt]

I had never heard of M-Disc! Thanks for the tip. I will have to check it out, although since I lost disc playing in the car I really haven't been burning many discs lately.

Do you have USB thumb drive input slot in car stereo?

 

[JonUrban]

Do you have USB thumb drive input slot in car stereo?

https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/fo...ls-3d-studio-5-1-surround-audio-system.25174/

 

[HomerJAU]

Disc rot! It will bite every optic disc at some stage. How long does it take to copy a disc (and when the copy is complete you probably copied the rotten bits too). Even a single hard drive can lose bits over time.

I’m using a NAS with 3 disc RAID arrays that have each file copied over 3 discs (it’s kind of equivalent to having 3 copies over 3 discs). I’m using a disc format called btrfs which has a feature that automatically compares (and fixes) bit rot. It compares all three versions of each bit and if all three aren’t the same the incorrect bit is changed. This auto fix runs every two months on my system.

With a RAID array like this one drive can fail and can be replaced. The new disc gets rebuilt from data on the first two.

I also have single disc backups. Ideally these should be re-written and verified once a year or so.

The other major advantage in using hard discs: Speed of backup, copying (and ease of playback, I mean: if you’ve got all your music on hard disc, why not actually use it for playback!)

 

[Ranasakawa]

I've said a lot of times, any -R technology, CD-DVD-BR, will fail: it's just a matter of WHEN, not IF.
ANY -R media has a polymer that is sensitive to light, that's how the technology works with the laser, but even after the burn process it is still sensitive to light and, being mostly a organic polymer, it suffer also natural degradation.
Back up to hard drive until you can, and then backup the hard drive too.

Very interesting comments. I used to back up every CD to a CD-R until money ran out.
I will be interested in seeing how my 1000s of CD-Rs and DVD-R survive the next decade or so.
Luckily I also have all audio in HDs too.

 

[Quadchuck]

thanks for all the reply's

1-the discs warp and become unplayable is one problem, I don't think that's the only problem
2- I burn at the default rate of disc which is the fastest...today I burned 2 J.Beck discs that I had H.D. copies, my Pioneer Burner burned at 40x.
discs played fine....is it better to burn at slower rates, will dye be more stable?
3-I love to print the album cover on the disc surrounded by the 4 colors just like a Q4 reel to reel, It looks great.

 

[winopener]

thanks for all the reply's

1-the discs warp and become unplayable is one problem, I don't think that's the only problem
2- I burn at the default rate of disc which is the fastest...today I burned 2 J.Beck discs that I had H.D. copies, my Pioneer Burner burned at 40x.
discs played fine....is it better to burn at slower rates, will dye be more stable?
3-I love to print the album cover on the disc surrounded by the 4 colors just like a Q4 reel to reel, It looks great.

1) Before a CD/DVD start to warp, it had already lost read capabilities. So if you let your favourite music cdr blistering in the van and it warped, forget it....
2) Slow burn rate aren't the miracle cure by itself; check out the various write speeds the disc is designed to and choose the slower one that does meet disc and burner. For example, a cd disc may be designed for 10x, 16x, 20x and 40x, while a burner has 4x, 8x, 12x, 16x, 24x, 40x, 52x. The lowest common is 16x.
3) get the media with a matte finish and a Primera. Avoid labels.

 

[quadsearcher]

I used "coaster" CD-Rs to try to keep birds away from berry bushes, hanging from strings tied to a tree limb. In one season the foil or whatever it is had baked out of them, they turned mostly clear.

 

[atrocity]

So I have eight (8) drives available under three different OSs. I have many times gotten lucky and found one of those drives got along with an old problematic disc, when the other drives I have just could not hack it.

It's crazy how often this is necessary, even with brand new discs. I've lost count of how many times I've worked with a stack of CDs and suddenly hit one that refuses to read cleanly in whatever drive I'm using at the time. Switch to another drive and have no problem at all.

Favorite software that is running on most of my machines including laptops:

I also recommend CueTools, which has the amazing ability to repair some bad reads after the fact. It's more likely to work with a mainstream title that's sold a jillion copies, but sometimes even an odd one is in their database.

 

[quicksrt]

It's crazy how often this is necessary, even with brand new discs. I've lost count of how many times I've worked with a stack of CDs and suddenly hit one that refuses to read cleanly in whatever drive I'm using at the time. Switch to another drive and have no problem at all.



I also recommend CueTools, which has the amazing ability to repair some bad reads after the fact. It's more likely to work with a mainstream title that's sold a jillion copies, but sometimes even an odd one is in their database.

I need to try that method, as I have a few bum burns worth fixing, but they are all obscure.