I have a few music CD-Rs that I burnt myself that are probably around 27 years old and the last time I played them, they played fine. Back then, HP gold CD-Rs were the king of the hill but they were around $4 each and it was very easy to make a coaster when burning on those old Windows 95 machines using a SCSI internal drive. You had to burn at 1x or 2x and not do anything else with your computer while burning and then maybe you'd get a good burn.
WINDOWS 95 !!!!! AOL 3 and dial up !! I bought my first house at the age of 21 and bought a PC shortly after. I think the PC was around £1000, which back in 1993 I'm thinking wasn't cheap . I never used to burn cds, but pretty sure my partner at the time did...as she it was her that wanted the computer. I wonder how many 21 year olds can afford to buy a house now and then drop a grand on a PC ? I wasn't even rich then !
Thanks for the reminder, everybody - I've got a load of CD-R's burned from all over, that need to get into the NAS before they wheeze out and croak! Found a lot of them in my "extinct compyooter software" box, and a bunch of old radio shows I might have lost forever if not for this thread!
This is what I use when burning a CDR on my PC: Yamaha Professional Grade High Speed CD Recordable Disc 74 Min 650mb Cd-r for sale online | eBay
Ha I was going to recommend Mitsui but guess not they're what I used back in the day. That said I always found CD-R longevity to be a crapshoot some lasted and some didn't regardless of brand.
My old 74 minute TDK CDR's still work okay and they're 20+ yrs old. I used to use Verbatim but all of a sudden they became incompatible with my CD recorder. I was using some Gold Kodak Archival blank CD's until they became obsolete. They were great... very hard to scratch. Nowadays I just buy the odd CDRW (rewritable) for my needle drops and run the rough music file through my PC's audio editing software to clean up and then add to my laptop for playing. I delete the CDRW and re-use it.
I bought extra TY's before they went out. I have used the JVC's without problems. I have not used any CMC brand, which use TY's dyes.
Wasn't sure where else to put this, but I got a CD-R someone burned in 1999, maybe 1998. They *think* it was a 4x because that was the fastest they could burn anything for a long time. It's a Sony brand CD-R with the cyan dye and the label side is a shiny multi-yellow colored design that you're supposed to write on. (It's got a pretty shiny coat to it.) No writing though, they just put it in its original Sony brand jewel case which is what they used to package each individual CD-R back then. It tops out at 74 minutes and the disc is almost burned to that capacity. I just played it start-to-finish and it played perfectly. To be fair, I think these discs were probably made very well by the major manufacturers back then, but still, very impressive.
I have some CD-R's burned on a 2002 Plextor at 1x using Taiyo Yuden CD-R's made in Japan that have lasted 20 years and still going strong.
About 20 years ago I bought a lot of MrData CD-Rs and I noticed in the past couple of years that they have all degraded: the last 5 minutes on each disc won't play. (They did play back in the day, by the way.) Luckily, I had them backed up on my computer. Around the same time, I bought a lot of cheap Tesco CD-Rs for stuff that wasn't too important. Every one of those cheap discs plays perfectly after 20 years. So, it's a lottery maybe. Anyway, backup is essential.
