Found this commentary I saved back in 2006:
Opinions vary on how to preserve data on digital storage media, such as optical CDs and DVDs. Kurt Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at IBM Deutschland, has his own view: If you want to avoid having to burn new CDs every few years, use magnetic tapes to store all your pictures, videos and songs for a lifetime."Unlike pressed original CDs, burned CDs have a relatively short life span of between two to five years, depending on the quality of the CD," Gerecke says. "There are a few things you can do to extend the life of a burned CD, like keeping the disc in a cool, dark space, but not a whole lot more."The problem is material degradation. Optical discs commonly used for burning, such as CD-R and CD-RW, have a recording surface consisting of a layer of dye that can be modified by heat to store data. The degradation process can result in the data "shifting" on the surface and thus becoming unreadable to the laser beam."Many of the cheap burnable CDs available at discount stores have a life span of around two years," Gerecke says. "Some of the better-quality discs offer a longer life span, of a maximum of five years."Distinguishing high-quality burnable CDs from low-quality discs is difficult, he says, because few vendors use life span as a selling point.
-- John Blau, IDG News Service Tue Jan 10, 2006
I burned all my favorite music to CD-RW discs 10-15 years ago. I seldom play them, and they seem to be ok now, but maybe I should be transferring all that music to other media... ?
Yes. Absolutely. As a former archivist I can say that most people don't consider the preservation of digital data. Those CDs/DVDs are not going to last. You need to get them on something else.
ReplyDeleteI transferred all of my CDs to hard drive as MP3s (I don't know about you but I find the quality acceptable) and now have multiple copies on multiple devices including two 2 TB hard disks that are my safety copies, kept in separate locations and updated once a year. I feel reasonably safe I'll get to keep everything. Additionally I get to carry it with me everywhere I go on my phone along with a large library of science fiction books and a few hundred of my favorite photos.
ReplyDeleteHard drives are so cheap now that the best thing to do is buy a couple and make redundant copies of your music collection. Don't forget to store some of the copies away from your home to protect yourself from fires/floods/tornados etc. Of course, if it comes to nuclear war, well, your music collection will be the smallest of your worries.
ReplyDeleteI've transferred all my hundreds of CDs to mp3s. This was quite some work, but when the iPod showed up, and I could finally have all my music on one single device, it was totally worth it. These days, of course, all my music lives on my phone, and having spent 9h in a train the last two days, I can not say what a blessing it is to just be able to shuffle through all of it.
ReplyDeleteBecause I started with and iPod, I am sadly married to iTunes because I have amassed a significant amount of "smart" playlists. I'm somewhat concerned about the fact that Apple is slowly abandoning iTunes. I have not found another music manager yet that's free, stable and can handle my 24k tracks with ease. iTunes ain't great, but I know how to work with it.
WinAmp and Music Match, the pre-iTunes program that Apple gave Windows users, Match seem to have died. Music Match was so much better than iTunes.
It is unfortunate that the current move is to streaming. I'm just not interested.
Like Rocky, I keep all my music (and my pictures) on an external drive and I keep several backups. One of them lives a state away with family, just to have a significant physical separation to my place. I swap it out when I visit. It's too much data be workable in the cloud.
I sometimes wonder if I need to keep my CDs. They're just collecting dust and the CD rack I have is a shelve too small so it's a mess. I don't even have a CD player anymore other than in my laptop. But whenever I think about throwing them away, I just can't because I just there's too many memories of saving up for them as a kid, and painstakingly finding rare issues them at CD fairs (remember those?).
I was a dedicated Winamp user but it decayed over time. I never used music match. When I did finally get a phone, and tablet, another tablet, and another phone, I searched for quite a while to find a good music player app. The one that works best for me is Rocket Music Player. It's free (with ads) and I think it has a paid no advertising version. I believe it'll use playlists generated by other programs and it has multiple different Shuffle modes (songs, artists, folders, Etc)
Delete@Nepkarel, what you could do is throw out your CD cases and replace them with see-through envelopes/sleeves large enough to hold the booklet, disk and back cover, then use an old-fashioned tab system to organize them. It's a bit of a project, but you'll only need to do it once and it saves you loads of storage space.
DeleteWinamp 2.91 is the version to get (for Windows). Yes, it is old, but works great. Also, VLC is a good music player as well.
DeleteI’ve been using M-Discs as of late when I burn optical media since those claim to last longer
ReplyDeleteI've been sorting through my collection of disks this week, deciding what to toss and what to keep. I found a disk I burned back in 1997. It still reads just fine. But I have purchased CDs from the late 80's that no longer play.
ReplyDeleteNote that all this good advice applies to music, videos, electronic records, and photos. To restate what others have said, the two underlying rules are duplication and diversity. You should have a backup of everything you care to keep, and preferably more than one backup. And the backups should be diverse, especially in location, both near and far. I have a primary “original” on my computer, a backup copy on a RAID NAS (explained shortly) in the house, and a remote backup outside the house. A NAS is simply a network-attached storage box, a small, specialized computer on you home network that stores data; home NAS units usually have built-in media server software so that you can play music, video, or photos in any device in your house (PC, phone, tablet, TV). Inside the NAS, I have two disks that are copies of one another. If one fails, I replace it and the NAS automatically copies the data files to the new disk, providing essentially endless life. Yes, the electronics can fail, so I actually have two NAS systems that I keep in sync. It took weeks to copy all those CDs and DVDs, and I do not plan to do that again.
ReplyDeleteSurprised no one is commenting on file formats for digital storage. It's beyond my expertise, and I can't afford to be true audiophile at present, but with the price of storage plummeting there is no reason not to be using lossless formats like FLAC or WAV files. I ripped a ton of cds to 128 kbps mp3 files years ago and deeply regret it -- can tell the difference from original cd quality even on my "entry level" (relative to true audiophile equipment) speakers and headphones.
ReplyDeleteI would welcome more informed comments from more sophisticated readers.