23 new of 36 responses total.
Yes, dye. In CD-Rs.
Okay. But I am all digital now, she says. I rip my CDs to mp3s and carry 'em all on my little iPod. It is very nice. But I have to say that I have CDs that are old and do not have any degradation problems, given that I always take good care that they are in their cases when they're not being played. My older cassette tapes and videotapes have started to degrade to the point that I can't use many of them. (And don't even get me started on eight-tracks.)
What's the best way to preserve DVD-R's of my family home movies?
Do you cassette tapes degrade (oxidize over time) or simply wear out?
I think videocassettes tend to get brittle and stretch.
> What's the best way to preserve DVD-R's of my family home movies? Make as many copies as you can and distribute them to family members. Keep making copies. Copying DVDs is lossless so there is no need to preserve some "master copy". Distribute the copies so that if a disc ever goes bad, you have plenty of places to borrow a disc from to make more copies.
There's no way to make a master copy which can be preserved? What if I have a stack of DVD-R's I want to keep in a safe for decades? Do I have to keep going back to make newer copies?
I don't know Todd. I just think making copies and distributing them is a pretty good way of making sure they are always available.
What about storing the contents of the DVD-R's on an external hard drive. That wouldnt have the same sorts of dye problems
After just a few years you'll take the whole stack and copy it onto a handful of HD-DVD (or Blu-Ray or whatever) discs. Then after a few more years you'll copy that onto a megacapacity disc that can store all the knowledge in the history of the universe and that can fit up your ass.
And then, when you need facts to win an argument, you can just pull them out of.. Actually, it'll be a lot like things are now..
Here's where I'm going with this: You send a CD to the Library of Congress as part of your copyright process. Assuming it is music or movie, how do you know if it will still be preserved in 30 or 40 years? Call me a scrooge, but I may not want to give copies to other family members. At least, not at this time.
Scrooges can pay for climate controlled safes for preservation. :-)
Will a climate controlled safe do it?
Digression back to music retail: The Wall Street Journal covers the stranglehold of Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Target on what is left of CD retailing -- and the news that those chains are looking to shrink their commitment to slow-selling CDs. The chains are also difficult to impossible for specialty music labels to deal with. The big-box stores now control 65% of music sales, up from 20% a decade earlier. "Music Inside The Big Box" http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB117763890447584360-FIW3Xw8b3Xl0UYdG3 Jvx60dlqeg_20080426.html?mod=rss_free The WSJ article will likely only stay available for a short time. Here is a bloggy summary which should have more persistence: "Big Box Retailers Not Doing As Crappily As The Rest of the Industry -- But They're Getting There" http://idolator.com/tunes/wal_mart/big-box-retailers-doing-not-quite-as-crappily-as-the-rest-of-the-industry++but-theyre-getting-there-255767.php ----- And, a recent item which I have now lost reported that many Wal-Mart stores are going to remove about 20 feet of CD bin space to make room for iPod accessories.
Good lord! (I don't know that they need to sell that many accessories -- a good case, some earphones, and maybe some speakers, if you really want 'em, and you are good to go!)
I guess I am a little less knowledgeable than I thought. I never really looked into what the difference was between a CD and a CD-R and why it is able to write on a DVD-R. So a CD or DVD is a longer storage medium because the reflective bumps are imprinted in a reflective layer rather than a dye.
Actually, the manufactured CDs are molded/cast with the bumps, then have the reflective layer deposited on top of that, which is then sealed with laquer. I'm assuming DVDs follow a similar process, but haven't confirmed it. The burnable discs are done with a change in a chemical layer.
iirc, the re is someting organic in the cd/dvd buring process which does make a deterioratoin possible/probable but the details are fuzzy.
I'm not sure how many of you are Apple fans, but if you've seen any of the Apple Keynotes recently, but iTunes is now directly competing with stores such as Walmart and Target. Plus, with EMI now offering DRM-Free high-quality music, I think a lot of the major labels are going to start extening into the digital world rather than defending copyrights and suing fans.
There it is in black-and-white, full page ad on Page 1 of the July issue of Current magazine: last day for Schoolkids-in-Exile, July 31. I was in the store for a bit yesterday; bought a copy of the Archie Shepp jazz album that was playing, and also a recent Hoven Droven live album. It may be in jazz that I will miss Schoolkids the most; much of my jazz collection consists of things I heard in the store. In all other fields I have lots of other good sources for information. Steve the owner said he didn't plan to raise the discount beyond 20%, because then he was losing money on each CD. He's planning to run a web store with what's left of the stock after the physical store closes, for a limited time. My somewhat snarky opinion is that it's about 5-8 years too late for Schoolkids to be talking about selling CDs via an internet store. And, if much of the old stock hasn't sold after six months of being offered in-store at a 20% discount, what is going to make it more appealing on the web? New-release CDs are still arriving -- only a 5% discount on those, though. I imagine all the unsold ones can be returned to the wholesaler after the store closes. Well, I hope the store has a good blowout during Art Fair. I'll probably try to get there every Saturday this month just for nostalgia.
resp:34 "if much of the old stock hasn't sold after six months of being offered in-store at a 20% discount, what is going to make it more appealing on the web?" The main advantage is that people looking for a particular cd might be able to find him more easily. For not very much money, he might even be able to use Amazon's service for that. There might be nobody in the Ann Arbor area who wants to buy a particular cd but there are probably some people in the USA as a whole who might want it.
I'm going to have to agree with Ken on this one -- I don't see any likelihood of selling these discs at full price or 20% off through an on-line store. 50% off *might* move a lot of them, but shipping costs will mean that customers will still be paying something like 75% of retail costs for a disc priced at 50% off. Given that, why not steepen the discount to 33% or some such and try to move them locally while there's still a storefront? It's a *lot* of work to list, sell, and ship individual discs. Unless there's a wholesale operation to take them off his hands or a distributor willing to take them back, I think the Schoolkids in Exile owner is crazy if he's going to try selling them individually on the web..
You have several choices: