One of my big projects for this year has been going through and listening to every CD I own in order to clear some space on my shelves, thin out the overgrown herd a bit, and make a few bucks from selling the oldies but goodies on Amazon. Currently, I'm nearing the end of the R section (lots of Rolling Stones, Todd Rundgren and Rush in the air lately) and hoping to get through the end of the alphabet by Christmas.
Anyway, while going through this marathon endeavor, I've been making the disturbing discovery that a lot of old CD-R titles have deteriorated a lot more quickly than I'd anticipated, especially titles that have some kind of labeling or silk screening done on the top side of the disc. I'd heard before that some CD labels were notoriously prone to ruining CD-Rs over time (Goat knows how), and it appears that has been quietly happening in my shelves the last few years. Ick.
For me, this is not a major problem: nearly all of the music I own on CD-Rs is bootlegged live recordings, as that particular segment of the music market went nearly all CD-R around 1998 or so. Thankfully, this means much of this music is replaceable (and perhaps even upgradeable) if I know where to look (and I do). What I've found is that not every CD-R I own has gone bad, but enough have become undependable that I've been backing everything up to FLAC in hopes of keeping at least some of these recordings in playable shape.
So, to anyone out there who has placed a fair amount of your music on CD-Rs, whether in musical or data form (particularly those of you who then added some kind of fancy colorful label to the top): you might be well advised to start checking some of your archives and making sure everything is in playable shape. Hopefully, you'll be spared an unpleasant surprise.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment