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Monday, November 24, 2008

New Thing #318--Experiment

I generally put my music CDs in a sleeve or jewel box, so I don't have to worry about them getting messed up. However, accidents happen; today I found a disc floating loose in my car. Turning it over, I noticed it was dirty and had several scratches on it. I tried playing it, but it wouldn't play.

Cleaning it didn't work; the imperfections remained on the surface. The disk wasn't essential to my collection, but I wanted to try to fix it. I remembered a friend telling me about a radical repair for malfunctioning media. Today I boiled a CD to remove the scratches.

I put a couple of inches of water in a pan on the stove, let it boil, then added the disc. After approximately 10 seconds I took it out with a pair of tongs, set it on a towel, and patted it dry carefully.

I put the disc in my computer's drive, opened the media player, and hit start. It worked great now! No skipping.

9 comments:

  1. wow...i didn't know that trick! i'll have to try it!

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  2. Interesting. Never heard of this. I might try it if I come across a scratched cd.

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  3. It's my understanding that you should try less drastic measures before you use boiling water; sometimes it will ruin the CD.

    Today, I wasn't too concerned about it.

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  4. I had not heard of this before.. like you say it does sound radical but if it works you have gained everything and lost nothing.

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  5. I've never heard of this. I have the entire series of Strangers With Candy on DVD and it would seem that @ the DVD packaging factory someone/thing was a bit overzealous with the glue and they got the packaging glue on a couple of the DVDs. I didn't notice this until it was too late to return...so I will try this! They are alreaady kinda ruined, so it's not like I can ruin them more.

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  6. Very cool! I'll try this on an album I don't like.

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  7. Good thing to know! I had no idea. I once threw away a cd that I really liked because I dropped it on the street, then accidently kicked it across the pavement when trying to pick it up. It was shot. Maybe I could have saved it.

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  8. that's a neat idea. i'll give it a try on one of my scratched up mix-cds.

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