Re: CD's and Sharpies

["Travis Hartnett"<tiktok@sprintmail.com>]

>You don't really need to worry about using Sharpies >on commercial CDs 
>(ones
>pressed), the problem as described is with CD-R >media. 

I've heard the "Sharpies eat through CD-R" story and I'm a bit skeptical 
since
I never hear about what the "safe" pen is and I also remember the urban 
myth
that regular CDs would start to rot after three or four years ("Dude...it's
already happening at radio stations..." usually accompanied this 
information).
 I've got over a thousand commercially produced CDs, dating back fifteen
years, and I've yet to find one that was "rotting".  

And the idea that analog reel-to-reel is a stable format isn't watertight
either.  If you store the reels vertically, tail out, in a
humidity/temperature controlled environment, with a minute of blank tape
between each take to avoid print-through and have the studio assistant 
rotate
the reels in their box a quarter turn each month to prevent the weight of 
the
tape from flattening under gravity's influence AND you're lucky enough to
avoid the periodic bad batches of tape that get produced, then you'll 
probably
be able to play the tape back in a few decades.  

Dig back through old issues of Mix or EQ and you can find plenty of horror
stories of 2" masters that need to be baked in a warm oven for a few hours
before they'll play long enough [once. maybe] to be transferred to another
format (usually digital in the accounts I've read [Roger Nichols/Steely Dan
pops to mind]).  And these were tapes stored under allegedly professional
conditions.  For the home user, the idea of maintaining a tape vault is
prohibitively expensive and quite unlikely.  I've got CD-Rs that are five
years old that have been stored under normal household circumstances, and 
I've
yet to have one go bad.  Make new copies of all your CD-R masters each 
year if
you're paranoid, or give up the idea that every note needs to be preserved 
for
all time.

TH