Art, something else to be aware of.

Note that I have found that the overwhelming majority of the pinholes are extremely small. By this I mean 1/32 of an inch or smaller. In these cases most players will invariably not have any read issues.

What is currently unknown – to me anyway – is whether or not these pinholes get larger over time. I am testing a theory that they do not, nor does a disk with pinholes “contaminate” another disk without pinholes. Only a significant amount of time – say one year from now – will give me the results I’m interested in regarding the aforementioned.
At the moment, I am operating under the thinking that these pinholes are a result of “less than exactly perfect” manufacturing. Meaning, I believe the technology itself is sound, however, the manufacturing process (chemicals used included) is very finicky and varies widely.

I have about two dozen different brands of CD, including some that were believed way back in the day to be the holy grail of disks. Namely, mitsui, taiyo yuden, denon and telarc. I am finding that the “best” disks from a data preservation perspective are Maxell and Kodak Ultima Infoguard. Clearly there are better disks than others, where better is defined as less prone to pinholes. I am also coming to understand why. The Maxell and Kodak disks (and some others) seemingly use a different chemical as the reflective surface, and it is noticeable. If you hold a Kodak disk up to the light the color is yellow, not blue and there is no “silver” per se. Disks that are bluish in color when held to the light and that have a silver surface (label side) are the worst.

Depending on your schedule in order to copy your entire collection, perhaps you could think about prioritizing based on disks that you find by visual inspection have this problem.

Art -

This excerpt is from the MusicCHI website:

Our ripping engine is of the highest quality (Bass audio), if you wish, we give you the possibility to use another ripper, as, for example, Exact Audio Copy. As the MusiCHI Ripper has very powerful tagging possibilities, you can prepare all the tagging information in our application and rip with any ripper of your choice. Later, you can scan the folder, where EAC has put the files with the MusiCHI Tagger and recover your tags.

Hal,

Thanks for all your help and for the wealth of information about pinholes, etc. I have been buying commercial CDs since the early 1980s. None of the discs that I have purchased have ever, to my knowledge, become unplayable over time. On very rare occasions, I have encountered a disc which would not initialize on one of my players. However, in every case, I could play the disc on another player without issue. And, I could copy the offending disc in my computer and play the copy on the player which rejected the original disc.

Every once in a while, I will have a disc "hang up" during play. But, every time that problem has occurred, the issue has been a smudge on the disc and cleaning has resolved the problem. I have discs which are over 30 years old and they still play flawlessly.

I also have a number of discs I have created from files on my computer (usually files I have created by recording LPs from my collection, then cleaning them up with special software before creating CDs). I have not been particular about the brand of blank CD-Rs I have used for this process. So far, none of these copies have failed either.

I am aware that I can use EAC to rip discs, then use Musichi's tagging program. However, I have had excellent results so far, using Musichi's Ripper and Tagger, so I plan to continue with that approach. I'm glad to know about EAC so that, if I begin to encounter issues, I can employ EAC as an alternate ripper.

I have not yet looked at EAC's website - is it a free download?

Best,

Art

EAC is free.

Art, I'm glad to read that your disks of 30 some odd years still play and to date you have not encountered a playback issue. Irrespective of whether or not the disks play or can be read, have you checked for pinholes?

Hey there,
Welcome to the project I took on several years ago. Fortunately I work from home frequently so just kept feeding the CD drive on my computer.
I do mac not pc so probably can't be too much help.
Very happy to have done so. Now have great play lists, can put on any tune I'm in the mood for, can do easy A/B testing of music (just went through looking for my "best" recording of Beethoven's 9th for example).
And I've been collecting some hi res tunes as well.
Hope it works well for you.

GDHAL wrote: Art, I to am involved in this endeavor. In my case I have over 3500 CDs, however, I am not converting all of them.

Just some points for you to consider. I can elaborate but this will suffice for now.

1) You may want to rethink the ripping software you are using. Exact Audio Copy is the de facto standard in this space. And for good reason, particularly in "problem" CDS. Hence point #2.

2) Check your CDS by holding the top toward a bright light. You will likely find you have about 15% with "pinholes". I can elaborate here as this is a very troubling phenoninon and I have been and continue to research the matter.

3) I will be looking to purchase an 8TB unit in the near future and am considering options (brands, etc.). I have a 1TB unit at the moment.

4) A proper CD setup using balanced inputs will produce superior quality sound.

Best of luck as you and I are in a similar boat here.

Hal

In the ensuing discussion about media degradation and ripping software, point #4 above seems to have gone unnoticed. I and many others would wholeheartedly disagree and in fact believe a computer based audio system is far superior to spinning discs.

Here's an article. www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/do-har...nd-better-than-cd-2/ You can find many more. Also note that even when the CD player wins they're often comparing $1000 computers to $30,000 transports. Since I can not afford the latter. I'll take the former when the race is that close.

To get the best out of a CD you need to manage transport physical noise and vibration and carefully address jitter even after that is done. All of that is much easier with a computer based audio system. Unless the manufacturer makes transports, you often see computer based systems at high end shows driving six figure systems.