“Disc rot” of read-only optical media is effectively a superstition outside of a handful of MPO CDs from the 1980s/90s with manufacturing errors, and the odd mastering/pressing failure (which shows up from day one, and would never be delayed).
Data corruption is a completely different, constant problem with any read-write media, including hard drives/SSDs. It should not be a problem if you are using a decent filesystem/operating system, have a RAID array, and use a UPS/backups.
Curious about what that means.
I guess you mean other than RAID 0.
Well, I have a European pressing of Metallica’s black album from 1991 which has increasing numbers of pinhole-size deterioration of the aluminium layer. So while it is not a super common thing, it’s not a superstition either.
There is evidence of CD discs going bad. There’s ample evidence on certain Grateful Dead discs. They seem to have been traced to a particular plant. Read all about it here (and I have personally seen some of these discs and the problems described in this thread).
Yes, I have discs with pinholes as well. Pinholes are often there from the factory (or come from environmental damage), and do not necessarily mean “bit rot” - I have many early CDs with pinholes from the early 1980s that are 100% perfectly readable, CRC-verified. And discs without them that are not.
Generally pinholes do not “develop” over time - they’re either there from the beginning and are harmless (if the disc passes CRC checks), or the top layer was abraded or damaged in some way - they don’t indicate “disc rot”.
Yeah that’s a famous (and as you mention decently well-documented) example (like the MPO discs of the 80s/90s) of a particular factory having an explicit manufacturing issue that began showing up very quickly (relatively speaking) in the lifetime of the disc.
What I’m saying is that outside of straight-up plant-specific manufacturing errors that show up very quickly in the life of the disc, disc rot over time just generally doesn’t exist, as far as we know.
It’s either
RAID doesn’t provide security against bit rot / flipped 1s and 0s on it’s own. It provides security against drive failure.
You’re looking at ZFS or something if you want to silently handle and recover from this kind of corruption. Erasure coding is also popular (look at MinIO if you want an easy way to deploy something like this).
Bit Rot in a consumer context is somewhat rare in terms of fatalness, generally a filpped 1 or 0 will not render something like a media file unusable in its entirety. Where it’s a concern is high volume (as in hundreds of tb, systems with huge amounts of frequent data IO etc) and archival storage that may not be connected and ‘re-ingested’ to new media for long periods of time.
I can only say that this disc doesn’t have any top layer damage and played perfectly when new. At some point about 10 years later it started skipping and when I checked, there were pinholes, but apart from those no other visible damage to the disk. And now, 10 more years on, there are more of them. Whatever you want to call it, it’s deteriorating.
Minor followup…
In terms of encoding a waveform, we have at least two methods. PCM and DSD.
Packaging that encoded waveform into a file, we have many choices. FLAC being very common and the list of others is very long. With multi-channel we have new options every once in a while like ATMOS. It may be the case that some or many people assume that a new piece of hardware or software will decode all formats previously known. That isn’t always the case however. (I’m sidestepping the bitdepth/frequency of the encoding as that can be limited by the decoding software or hardware. Messy business trying to get a perfect playback path - but Roon does a great job imo.)
Regarding OS - I think this is relevant as operating systems work with file systems. If one does not migrate data off an old drive to a new drive with currently available file systems, then that data is lost until such time they work through whatever barriers that are causing the data not to be read. Unlike Bit Rot, at least this scenario has hope of recovering the data.
Ultimately it is the music that I wish to enjoy. The overhead of preservation I defer to the owners of the recordings. I know the major labels put a lot of effort into preserving the amazing music catalogs we are privileged to enjoy. And for myself, I do make a hobby of playback and Roon definitely helped make the digital versions more enjoyable. As to the overheard of maintaining those bits…I write it off as one of the costs of my hobby.
I still contend nothing is permanent. Even the CDs are a license to use and the owner of a CD doesn’t own the recording. Digital is the same. We pay a fee and get to use the product delivered for as long as we can. Should be interesting when the copyright protections run out on the very popular recordings. We can already see multiple companies issuing copies and who knows the lineage of those waveforms. But I digress. Enjoy the music. On whatever platform floats your boat.
If it happens in just the right spot, it may very well become unusable. Since I’m an engineer and like to have fun in weird ways, I flipped a bit in a WAV file in the very first byte, changing it from 0x52 to 0x50, so it’s not a RIFF anymore, it’s a PIFF. Now Foobar2000 is angry:
dbPoweramp is not happy either:
WMP:
VLC simply doesn’t play anything.
Audacity won’t have it either:
Try ffmpeg? Sure:
This particular one is easily fixed, but only if you know what’s wrong. dbPoweramp is the only one that offers a useful error, but still, how many people would know what to do? Things can get worse with say Office files, which use OpenXML, i.e. XML files in a zip container. I’m sure you could flip just the right bit in a zip to make it un-zippable.
Anyway, I don’t want to be an alarmist. You’d have to be really unlucky to get bit flips, and even more unlucky get it in just the right spot. I’m just saying that maybe, possibly, I’m not that paranoid…
(((Entirely off topic
dBpoweramp’s site and forum are down at the moment; in case you’re trying. Presumably not for long… )))
I think that is the endgame for most of us. Certainly I’m less happy with clutter and even fiddling with metadata: it’s not the labour of love it had been historically.
But there is a lovely aesthetic with racks of physical, not to mention the sizeable sunk cost.
Oh no, not “internet rot”?
Gosh, at least my hometown was good for something 
The EMI plant was just down the road from where I lived, had a few mates who worked there as well.
Sorry, I’ll let you all get back to Bit Rot etc.
