Aging CDs, particularly HatHut

[AmirBagachelles]

Two of my treasured OOP hats - Carter-Bradford Comin' On, and Jimmy Lyons' Jump Up, are skipping out, each at particular moments (error is replicable). The Carter-Bradford seems to have a razor-edge width straight 3/8" scratch, or fault in the clear laminate, at the outer edge of the disc, thus last track won't play thru near the end. The Lyons, no visible faults, nothing, in fact I just recently bought it sealed. These discs are 12 yrs old or more, has anybody had similar problems with HatHut discs, as I have many discs, similar vintage, with visible wear and tear, all play fine, in car and discman too. In the case of Comin' On, can a disc be "polished" back to health with a fine emery cloth for example? Hat is maddening enough with the scarcity of their back catalog, recently I bought Ortega's New Dance in the cardboard sleeve, scratched the disc simply by removing it from that crummy pocket because there was a few grains of dirt or something inside behind the disc. Any advice would be appreciated, thanks, Dan

[Claude]

I haven't noticed any problem with my old HatArt CDs (about 20 of them).

[Bright Moments]

this is why i want to buy a HUGE harddrive and rip ALL my cds to it!

[Claude]

What if the hard drive fails (the Nr 1 PC hardware defect)?

It would be safer to rip the CDs to a lossless format and burn the files onto DVD-Rs (7-10 CDs fit on a DVD-R). These can also fail, but certainly not all at the same time.

Anyway, CD pressings are much more durable than burned CDs/DVDs (and hard drives), so the main purpose of the backup would be protection against loss or destruction, not deterioration.

Edited April 23, 2005 by Claude

[gslade]

I have the Lyons and it still plays fine

along with other older Hats

[Steve Gray]

I would suggest ripping it anyway.

Sometimes computer drives can get over errors, presumably because they attempt the read several times.

It is quite likely that you can produce a more or less error free copy from your original.