I’ve tried several brands of CD for burning by own, but have yet to find a brand of sustainable quality. It seems most CDs go bad within a year: tracks suddenly get stumbled over or stuck, “clear spots” develop on the disc, etc.

For the most part I make either audio CDs or MP3 disks for traveling, and play them in my RioVolt CD/MP3 player. Yeah, they tend to get scratched too, as I’m a natural born slob.

Anyone found quality blank CDs that endure?

About a month ago there was an article on Yahoo about how some guy pulled his CD collection out of a long term storage and found much of it ruined after 10 years or so. What was funny about this was that I had just left a site that deals with P2P programs and had been reading something about the latest RIAA lawsuits against music downloaders. Just one more reason why CDs are not a perfect medium in which to preserve your music.

There are a number of sites that evalute different manufacturers of CDs. One I saw tried to narrow it down to the specific manufacturing plant and claimed that even within the same brand there are often major variations of quality depending on who the actual producers were.

My own method is to stock up on brands that are NOT generic when they are on special. Here's a winner for you. 50 name brand CDs for free!!!!

http://www.radioshack.com/images/rebates/2601001.pdf

These are currently on sale for $14.99 with a $15 rebate.

For a while Office Max had near monthly deals almost as good for Fuji CDs. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any for a while. But then, Fuji has not sent me my rebate either which is 3 weeks overdue so maybe the deal wasn't so good after all.

Avoid CompUSA's "no name" brand as they are suppose to be terrible.

You might try checking the following site on a regular basis for all sorts of great deals on electronics. That's where I learned about the Radio Shack one.

http://forums.anandtech.com/categories.cfm?catid=40&entercat=y

I would suggest copying your archive media to new media of the same kind every 5 years, to reduce risks of media failure, which DOES happen.

Wow, an old post of mine from four years ago. And archaic as well.
To answer my original post, I ended up going with Toyo Yuden discs. They are supposedly the maker of the professional-quality discs the large disc burning outfits use. I had to buy 100 discs, the smallest amount they sold, and there was a price premium.
Well, the discs were shit, within a month the reflective coating started coming up. Either I was bilked with bad merchandise or the brand name is all hype. I still got most of the shits stashed away somewhere, I'll give them to someone I hate.

But I use a solid-state Mp4 player now, and have a DVD burner for archives and backups, and keep second/third copies of nearly everything on an external hard drive or net storage site.

Great quality, The Best prices on the net and excellent customer service and comes quickly! Been using them for about 4 years now and they always seem to have free give aways,, I got 2 nice DVD cases from them for free.. www.supermediastore.com

(Message edited by sobe9ball on August 02, 2008)