Re: [ARSCLIST] CD-R question

["Richard L. Hess" <arclists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 04:21 PM 2008-01-05, Howard Friedman wrote:
> And are you saying that a 534 minute CD will not survive as long as 
> an 80 minute CD, all other things being equal?

That is an interesting question. I would suspect that the likelihood 
of the 80-minute CD being useable is higher than the 534 minute CD 
because in 50 years someone will try and play both in a CD player and 
when one plays and the other one doesn't they may assume that the one 
that doesn't play is no good and dispose of it.

I realize that putting it into a PC drive and reading it would 
quickly educate the user, but I fear the least-common denominator 
when it comes to technical savvy in at least some archives. Many 
archivists try very hard to keep up with the technology, but 
archivist salaries are, sadly, rather small in many places and their 
workload is heavy.

When tapes started to squeal, many got dumpstered as "unplayable" 
with no recovery attempt made.

So, I do think that it is not as safe to leave a non-mainstream CD 
around in an archive.

As to the survival of the two from a photo-chemical perspective, I 
think that Jerry has provided information about what that depends on. 
Disc type, storage conditions, and quality fo writer are all key.

The other thing to worry about with the compressed audio CD-ROM is 
that you will need to have the proper codec to extract the compressed 
files. With WAV files, while you need a codec, it is the simplest 
variety. MP3 will be decodable, I suspect, longer than many other formats.

Cheers,

Richard

Richard L. Hess                   email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Aurora, Ontario, Canada       (905) 713 6733     1-877-TAPE-FIX
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.