CD Care and Scratch Filler Kits

by TR Editor

Compact disks were one of the greatest innovations that helped evolve the music industry, it is said that with proper care a CD could actually last a lifetime and play a song with out any degradation to the sound quality. Having CD's in your car, or that favorite disk you lent a friend that got scratched up, they can damage easily and cause gaps in your data or even render them unreadable. Don't fear if you are unable to get the CD to work there are a few desperate measures that you can take to attempt to recover the data.

When cleaning a CD use a soft lint free cloth, you can pick these up at most CD stores and wipe the CD from the center to the edge. DO NOT wipe in a circular, although this works with 12" vinyl, it is the worst thing you can do to a CD, CD lasers read a disk in a circular motion, so circular scratches can wipe out a large amount of data (music), . Where as a scratch in the direction of the radius will only loose a small piece of the data that will most likely not be audible when listening to a music CD.

CD buffers

I recommend these as the best solution to fix a deeply scratched CD, as you may know the data of a CD is kept on the top and the bottom layer is merely a plastic disk. What a CD buffer does is buff a thin layer of plastic off of the disk leveling out any scratches in the disk. This machine works astonishingly well, but can only be used once or twice on each CD, because it will eventually wear right threw the disk. So if you clean the disk make a copy of it in case it gets damaged beyond repair in the future.

Another solution is the scratch filler, there are plenty of different types on the market although there effectiveness is only good on CD's that have very minor scratches to them.

Tips to Keep Your CD's in Good Shape

• Always put your CD's back in their proper cases.
• Keep the CD cases closed especially when there is no CD in it, dust will build up on the inside of the case and it will transfer to the bottom of the CD when the cd is put back. which brings us to the next tip
• Clean the inside of your jewel case, as well as your cd's
• Make a copy of your CD, and use the copy instead of the original disk (store the original copy somewhere safe.)
• Always wait for your CD player to stop before ejecting your CD.