Looking for tips on CDR burning

[Rich Braun]

I wrote:
> The CD's I've burned seem to be far less durable than mass-produced
> ones.  One tiny scratch of the plastic coating, and I have to toss
> the CD or live with the damaged file.

Just a piece of ancient history for background:  I cut my teeth on computing
back when the TU56 tape drive was still around.  It held about a megabyte
(? the DEC website no longer has specs online), and provided pseudo-
random access by keeping track of tape block numbers and reading forward
and backward.  One of my coworkers demonstrated its durability by
rolling one of these tapes out along the hallway, walking all over it,
puncturing it a few times with a stapler, rolling it back onto the reel,
and re-reading it intact.  Rumor had it you could run part of the tape
through a paper-tape punch and still recover the data.

CDROM's clearly lack the redundant bits necessary to recover data lost
to physical damage.  I'm baffled at why these CDROM-mastering and
-reading programs fail to put any fault tolerance onto the media.  I
ought to be able to torment a CD with a stapler, ball-point pen, power
sander, and other weapons of destruction and still be able to salvage
all the data.  My guess is that with the track density of DVD's, fault
tolerance will be an absolute must.

-rich

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