cd player went down* the other week (or maybe before but i haven't noticed) and they're gonna switch off analog radio by the end of the years so...

* not too bad after 24 years!

https://www.amazon.com/WEAVER-Livest...2C127&sr=8-150

Cool!

(I guess I must have started something).

Now all I need is a horse and buggy!

Just remember that burned CD’s will degrade and can be totally unplayable in 5-15 yrs and especially when subjected to heat and light. Replicated CD’s will last much longer.

We are in the midst of a ripping project to preserve the local community radio station CD library and have found the opposite, the burnt CD's are ripping successfully, while the manufactured discs seem to have the most errors.

I have some burnt CD's from 2003 still working, the trick is to use high quality discs like taiyo yuden. I have some cheap ones from around that time that still work.

By “manufactured “ do you mean only replicated? Or replicated AND duplicated (“burned”) discs produced by a company rather than an individual ( all “burned” discs. ? The physical pits of replicated discs are inherently more durable than the chemical changes “burnt” into the reactive layer of duplicated ( “burned”) discs. Either type of disc are equally susceptible to surface scratches. I would bet that the commercially produced discs that failed were either actually duplicated and/or had more surface scratches due to being played/handled more.
More popular (more often played) recordings are more likely to have warranted ( and had financial backing for) replication rather than duplication.

One assumes this and I thought so too. But in practice it doesn't seem to be the case so far. I think the corrosion of the metal layer in manufactured discs seems to be the main problem.

Yes higher quality CDR discs will last longer, but regardless, the chemical layer that reacts when burning a disc is susceptible to on-going chemical changes/degradation with time and especially heat and exposure to light (esp. sunlight). The physical pits in replicated CD’s are inherently much more stable.

I have 20 years of burnt CDR's of concerts and live and studio recordings and sometimes have to dip into them for restoring a recording. None have failed yet. But they are stored in opaque envelopes in the basement. So maybe that helps keep the dye layers healthy.

Could be. I’ve only had failures of some high-quality CDR’s ( no CD’s). All have bern kept in the dark in air-conditioned space. None were eg left in my car.

Maybe never/rarely played is the key factor-no surface scratches.

Apologies, I should add that these burnt CDR contain data files and not the CD (layer) itself. I regenerate the CD from the data files and the CD Image spec.

Yes i see this or follow

For what it is worth, I used to keep backups of my early CD productions and live recordings on CD-Rs, later on DVD-Rs.

Last year I decided it would be a good idea to copy them to hard disk, only to discover that a number of them failed. Especially my first ever CD-production, although the actual finished master was still readable, some of the original takes were not.

I found the original DATs to which the recording was done, and they still worked perfectly when I transferred them to HD. So I still have all the material - should I ever want to go back to it.

(That CD is unlikely to be re-released, so it really was more of a theoretical exercise, but I decided I should keep what was still there.)

CD-Rs (and DVD-Rs) are a terrible backup medium in my opinion.

(Now I keep archived stuff on a large HD, which is backed up online. I am hoping that this is safer...)

FWIW, I've found that Toast's.disc repair works on about 99% of CDs that won't play on any player; I keep an old Mac around just for that reason.

I did try Toast's repair functions, but ended up with several CDs which were just not readable any more. I have since given up and thrown all of these CDs away. Fortunately I did not lose anything that I would ever need again. Even with this particular archive the final master files were all still there. I am not planning to re-edit any of this... and even if I did, I could still use the files taken from the DAT.

I also keep an old Mac around, but for a different purpose. I used to edit two-track using BIAS Peak, marking regions in SD2 files (and yes, the resource forks are intact). These files, unfortunately, and especially their region information, cannot be read by any up to date 64Bit software I tried. BIAS Peak only works on 32Bit, so I keep an old MacBook Pro with a Mojave System on a USB flash drive – just in case...

I was even able to salvage some files which were compressed using ZAP by Emagic, using an ancient iBook which barely booted at all.

I think I have now rescued all the data I wanted to rescue from old backups. I have converted any sd2 file to WAV. Hopefully that format is there to stay but I have learned my lesson and will convert as soon as there are signs of it being abandoned.

I still have a lot of DATs in storage with lots of live performances. Unfortunately I think the only way to save them is by transferring them in realtime...