There is a solution, which is to use an aluminium scandium alloy as the recording layer rather than pure aluminium. This would not oxidise if it were exposed to air. Yes, I do sell scandium for a living, and no, no one does make CD's this way, nor is anyone researching it.
Think of this as commenting to get links, except I'm already on the blogroll here.

Heh.

Well it's not a bad idea, but it would hardly solve my existing problem.

Although with much luck I suppose I'll be able to transfer everything to a hard drive or two within a few years. Hmm, let's see, if the average CD takes up about 600 megs, then a terabyte drive should store....

Oh man. I'm so hosed.

Own?

Silly boy, you don't own music. You just bought a license.

If you actually owned them, the original supplier would be required by contract to provide you with either archival rights or replacements.

Unfortunately, the transaction was not such a contract.

I recommend a big hard drive and high sample rate MP3s. You can get MP3 playing CD players now (my Sony DVD does it) and then have several albums on a single 650MB CD.

2,000 CD's, now that is a man after my heart. I must have my music too, but you far excede my collection.

You mentioned you had your CD's that went back 15 yrs. and now I am wondering when CD's came around. You kinda threw me there. Lets's see, the LP's, the 8 Tracks, The cassessets then CD's. I've been around quite sometime! I think the 8 Tracks were the 70's, but the CD's I don't remember.

Well, they started becoming mainstream in the late '80s, basically. They were still rather exotic when I bought my first couple of CDs--some Stevie Ray Vaughan and some Windham Hill. I remember just how excited I was when I got them. They were in a special section of he store, which was still predominantly tapes and LPs.

Those of us with Laserdisc players are well aware that poor manufacturing can result in leakage through the edges resulting in the data layer oxidizing. Properly manufactured CDs ought to be fine, but, I wouldn't be surprised that there are a number of poorly sealed CDs out there.

The real gold CDs ought to be immune even from poor sealing...

To some extent, all recording media degrade over time. What's happened with CDs, though, is they've failed to obsolesce quickly enough. 8-tracks and cassettes becames worthless after a few years, but they were replaced by new "gotta have" media that made audiophiles want to rebuild their collection. Aside from MP3s--which the industry is decidedly not pushing--they haven't come up with any real competition for CDs in twenty years.

Unless you really trash the suckers you won't have any problems. I have played CDs that I got for review at their onset and they are still fine. Worryingly I think my CD collection may be pressing 3000. Worse yet they are on both sides of the Atlantic.

My collection is about 1000 78 rpm discs, about 100 80 rpm very thick Edison records, 5000 LP's, a few hundred real-ro-real tapes, and about 1000 casset tapes.

To keep all this stuff working I have three multi-speed record players (with flip needles to accept the different grove sizes), two real-to-real, varible speed tape decks, and two casset tape players.

My oldest recordings are from 1898-1900, I don't have any CD's.

Dean,

That is one of the reasons why I converted all my CDs to MP3. I have about 800 Cds- Even at a high bit rate they come out to about 50GB. You are probably looking at about 150GB or so with your collection with a similiar sample rate. Of course, you will want to make a good backup of them so you don't have to do all that ripping over again!

You definitely will not be sorry you did this, all your albums will be a click away, you won't need to get up and search through your CDs to find that obscure title you wanted to listen to. Since most MP3 players categorize the songs by genre you have the option of listening to them by categories as well. I use iTunes to play my collection, it even has a feature where you can play your music randomly by album which is great when you don't want to bother looking for another CD to play but still want to play the songs in the oringinally intended order. It was definitely worth the time it took to rip my collection.

There are particular batches of CDs with production problems that caused them to degrade relatively rapidly. I really only know the classical end of the market, so those are the only examples I can give, but:

Hyperion Records in the UK had a problem with one supplier; the material of discs made at that plant "bronzed" after some time, and the sonic result was pretty much like dumping your dryer's lint basket onto a turntable while it was playing. Hyperion immediately announced that all such discs could be returned to the company and replaced free of charge.

RCA issued a couple of big boxed sets in the early 90s that had dark ink on the non-playing side of the discs that evidently sunk through and eventually made them unplayable. I think there was a Rubinstein collection afflicted in this way; there may have been others. The same thing happened with certain Italian pirate labels that got over-fancy with their production. I own a wonderful Ring cycle that I can't listen to at all because it's degraded all to hell. Though given what I paid for it, that's probably just comeuppance.

Moral: Convert everything to mp3. Disc space gets cheaper every day.

I'm not sure that great storage is all that critical. I mean my Jimi Hendriz 8-tracks still play fine, and I've only been reasonably good about storing them.

Keep the faith.

Stone tablets and a chisel.

I'm just saying.

Personally, having bought the Beatles in LP and CD, and having lost both collections in a divorce, I can say that time is a cure. After a while, you just get tired. There is an endless succession of good stuff coming down the pipeline.

Fuck it.

True, Ara, but the frequency response SUCKS. :)

I'm leery of converting to MP3 because it's a lossy compression scheme.

Apple's got a new lossless codec - obviously, it's bigger than MP3, but it's still smaller than a wave file.

Of course, we're on all AAC because with the standard speakers, you don't notice the difference anyway. Now if only the CDDB would allow for more tags so that we don't get those horrible listings with 30,000 pieces of info crammed into the "title" - it take a while to strip those out, unless you just re-enter the info properly yourself.

one of the problems with CD rot which i was aware involved mold. keep your CDs in a dry safe place and they stand a better chance of surviving a long time... i have some which are more than 15 years old... and they are all just peachy ....