What Do I Do With 50 Cheap Discs? (General comments)

Member Name: Mad_Vicar

Product:	General comments
Date:	29/08/01 (124 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Failed discs make good frisbees, coasters, attractive mirror tiles

Disadvantages: The sheer waste, terrifying life expectancy, crankier than a 74 Marina

Back when I was a CD Rewriter virgin, I made a few understandable mistakes. Firstly, I had just spent all my cash on the hardware and had precious little to squander on media, let alone luxuries like food and heat.

I bought some quality BASF blanks, but rapidly burned through these. Then my local Netto supermarket came to the rescue with 50 blanks for some ridiculous price. Now, some special circumstances need explaining. My PC at the time was endowed with a mere 1.9Gb of hard drive. So I had the brainwave of turning a few CD-Rs into Virtual Hard Drives. Using the Direct CD software that came with the Rewriter, I figured I could put off investing in a "tangible" HD forever.

Alas, it was not to be. The discs were terrible. My inexperience in not realising that the Direct CD application, whilst being brilliant in theory, demands a lot of a CD-R, and these generic discs just could not stand up to it. You only had to catch sight of the surface as you slipped it from jewel case to drive to scratch a nasty gouge into it. At the time we had an endless supply of novelty coasters as I knackered more discs than I burned. Then I spent even more of the food budget and purchased a 20Gb hard drive. The storage space problem solved, no more Direct CD foolishness for me.

But are there any uses for a great batch of iffy quality blanks? Well, of course, there is the novelty coaster idea, but you should really only do that with failed discs, for greatest economy. One use has appeared, at least as far as I am concerned, so breathe a sigh of relief.

I have a portable CD player and a mini-system thing knocking around the house. Now, I would love an MP3 CD player, but these Gas Board people, how they bleed me! So, I fill the gap by creating audio compilation discs of cracking tunes from the MP3 collection. Here comes the clever part. Everybody gets sick of a compilation album after a while; or want to change the make-up, maybe add some new so
ngs and dump some over-played ones.

Now, given that the cheapo CD-Rs are a bit vulnerable to outside forces, such as heavy breathing, looking at them, talking too loudly near them, they suit the "temporary" nature of the car-based-compilation or Discman-collection.

This is how I used up my last consignment, and some of them are still going strong to this day. The real crux of the matter is not to store anything on them that you really care about. Don't archive the only copy of the transcribed old reel of tape with Grandad singing in 1973 (the one you spent 27 hours working with Spin Doctor to restore and digitally remaster) on one of these. Spend some serious money and buy serious discs. If someone you love has bought you a spindle containing 50 SAYFKEEPA TrustiDisc 74s, smile, say thanks, and keep em for yer compos...

Summary: