I love my CD collection. I have CDs I’ve owned for 10+ years that play as well as the day I bought them. However, recently I have begun to notice quite a few of my CDs skipping. I implore the Teeming Millions to help me resolve this problem!
The CDs have been skipping in multiple players, so I don’t think it’s dirty lenses. A car CD player has entered the equation – one of the ones with the slot on the front you slide the CDs through – are those known to cause problems with CDs?
I’ve also recently begun using a regular old WalMart brand CD wallet. Do these have a tendency to scratch CDs? How about if you store the CDs with their paper album covers?
If my CDs are scratched or dirty, what’s the best way to clean them? Old dishcloth? Windex? Alcohol and water? Expensive wipeys bought from a music store?
How about if they’re scratched – is there any way to fix a scratched CD so that they’ll play again without skipping?
(That brings up a side topic: buying used CDs. When buying used CDs from a reputable store, how do you know that they’re not scratched? Do they have a machine that checks each one for scratches? Do they have a machine that fixes them? Do they guarantee that they aren’t scratched, or is it caveat emptor?)
I got one of those CD scratch repair kits for Christmas. I didn’t think it would work very welll, but actually it worked great. It uses polishing compound to rub the scratch out. Some of my CDs took a lot of rubbing to get them to work, but eventually I fixed all my scratched CDs. I also know that some record stores have scratch fixing devices. I am not sure which stores or how much they charge.
The copying hardware is such that it can ignore the scratched areas and will not ‘jump’. The resulting copy is jump-free and if I remember rightly there is no noticable evidence of scratches in the sound.
Ditto what GorillaMan said, start at the center and wipe to the edge, along the radii(Pl. of radius). I would use a soft cloth, a piece cotton may leave fibers and then you have the potential for read errors. Same with paper towels. I have a fancy mechanical one that works well. Record/DVD stores sell them.
SOME software/CD writing drives can copy a scratched CD without errors, but some cannot. The depth of the scratch also matters. It is worth a try, though.
The wallet CD cases are the worst! Not only can you scratch them pulling them in & out of the sleeve, they don’t offer good protection if the data side takes a hit.
Store them in their original jewel cases. You can get storage cases designed for CD jewels. I have one in my car. Although the wallet is more compact & you can store more CDs per amount of space, you end up with scratched CDs.
Ask your store what the policy on returning used CDs is.
I’ve had good luck with the SkipDr device. After re-surfacing, the CD will look like hell - it sands the surface with a 400-grit (or so) abrasive to a decidedly non-shiny appearance - but I’ve rendered unreadable CD-ROMs and audio discs readable. Just long enough to make a dupe, but that’s all you need.
CDs that are scratched on the laser side can often be recovered by polishing the marks out with things like brasso, there are more coarse liquid abrasives but then you have to use the finer ones such as silver polish to bring a shiny surface back.
Whenever you do this, you absolutely must take care to protect the back of the CD. Usually you have to lay the CD down, laser side up, and then polish away,but then the silvered coating on the CD back can get damaged from rubbing against a coarse surface, and this is what stores your music, if this is damaged it is terminal.
Now for the bad news, I have several CDs that are now unplayable, despite not being marked in any way at all and perfectly clean.
These CDs are around ten years old, when you hold one against a new CD you can see a slight brownish tinge to them, the new one looks nice and silvery.
My only guess is that over time those uplayable CDs have somehow decomposed, the silver backing has maybe oxidised somehow, whatever the reason, I cannot use them anymore.
I don’t know if this applies to all CDs, or just certain one, I have older ones and they are fine, perhaps certain ones made in certain factories will suffer this fate.
I don’t imagine my gold limited edition CDs will go this way, I certainly hope not.
I have a CD where a chunk of the silver side was scratched off. I used a perment marker and marked in the spot then put a piece of tape over it. It workes but I wouldn’t put it into a cars cd player because of the tape. I would say there are other ways to coat the shiny side of the cd so that the cd can be read by the laser.
Maybe some discussion of the fundamental workings of a CD is in order. How is the information stored on the CD? I was under the impression that the pits were etched on the surface – are they instead encoaded on a deeper layer, with a clear plastic “window” layer over them? In other words, what is getting scratched, the information, or the surface that provides a clear view through to the information?
One thing to keep in mind is how the data is arranged on the CD. CDs have a natural error correction inherent to them. The way this is accomplished is a certain piece of data exists in a specific place on the CD, but that exact same data also exists before and after this location in diced up waves. This way, if the damage is localized, hopefully the data can be recreated before the buffer runs out. When it cannot, then the CD skips.
Since the CD is circular, do not wipe a CD in a circular motion. This only increases the liklihood that you will spread the damage. Instead, wipe across the CD. This will minimize any damage.
How Stuff Works has a great explanation of how commercial CDs are encoded and how that is different from how home burned CDs are encoded.
Oversimplified, both have a smooth acrylic layer protecting the encoding. The encoding is done in a deeper layer. A commercially produced CD has an underlying series of bumps that are interpreted by the CD reader as 1s and 0s. A home burned CD has a laser that “burns” a dye to change it’s color to represent the 1s and 0s.
By the way, the reason bad scratches cause a problem even with the incoding “buried” in a deeper layer, is that the scratch causes the laser to be deflected either on its way down to the bump (or burned dye) or on its way back out upon reflection.
An abrasive agent smooths out the scratch, but doesn’t harm the underlying encoding.