Intrada Soundtrack Forum

Tonight's public service announcement is to remind you to backup your optical media. I recently ripped a stack of newly bought, but long ago released discs and some of them are demonstrating problems.

Optical discs can be trusted as much as most people, which is to say not at all. Hard drive storage is cheap, so get those CDs, DVDs and even Blu-rays copied!

Hey...
I don't believe I've ever had a CD go bad on me... Even my Herrmann Unicorn CDs haven't bronzed.

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I-love-Goldsmith, yes-I-do...
I-love-Ber-nard-Herr-mann-too! EVERYBODY SING!!!

I've been collecting CDs for 30 years and none of them has ever gone bad... I can't count hown many HDD I've seen crashing. Hard drive disks are much much more fragile because of the mechanical parts. So I would rather say, back up your HDD on optical media as they are proven to last much longer than anything else, if you take care of them.

What are the symptoms of a bad disc? I bought a 1988 CD of The Western Film Music Of Dimitri Tiomkin recently, it seems to sound muffled compared to the LP.

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"I used to worry about losing my mind. Now that I've lost it I don't worry about it anymore." -Wavy Gravy

I’ve actually done far better than that.

I use the M-Disc format. It’s designed to outlast any other form of physical media and will not suffer data loss because it uses a rock based layer to write data to, versus all current media which uses an organic based dye.

My entire personal photo and video collection, my video edit projects and my film score collection are all preserved and I add to it as time goes on.

My James Horner collection is preserved on one 100GB BDXL M-Disc and one 50 GB Blu-ray M-Disc, and I’ve got other composers on subsequent discs as well. All backed up in WAV format since I’m not a FLAC user at all. Yes I know all the comparisons and advantages over WAV, but to each their own. I’m not naive about it.

At this point in time, I have ripped most (I don't know, maybe about 95%) of my CDs to lossless files. Since that was a lot of work (oh, that tagging, oh that tagging...) I also make sure there are backups.

I also rarely play any CDs anymore but prefer the simplicity of streaming my own ripped discs on my T+A setup. Of course, I still do have my CDs, the earliest ones from 1987, and fortunately they still seem to play just fine.

Yes, secure ripping is ideal, though I admit for speed and convenience I have imported my collection via iTunes, (not perfect, but still more comfortable and better to use than any other program I have tried). In those very few cases where there were problems importing with iTunes, I used EAC to import.

The biggest pain in the arse is, once ripped, figuring out how I want to listen to some of these albums. I don't have the patience to listen to a 2+ hour long album when a number of cues are similar and not so interesting. Most of these lengthy complete and expanded releases can be made into much stronger presentations of 40-minutes to 1 hour, but you have to put in the time to make it so.

I had some of those PDO discs go bad on me back in the 90s -- fortunately PDO issued free replacements.

Last year I backed-up my entire collection onto an external hard drive (as well as on Blu-ray data discs). I ripped them as both uncompressed AIFF files and as mp3s. My CDs all seemed to have survived the ravages of age -- except John Scott's To The Ends of the Earth, which has some deterioration or "laser rot" on the final track.

What are people's go to software when it comes to the best way to rip a disc? And what is your preferred file format?

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Grail: ONE OF OUR DINOSAURS IS MISSING (Ron Goodwin)