I’ve never ripped CDs or DVDs before for any reason and am curious how this works since I have some stuff I wanna see about backing up but am nervous about ruining the disc. I’ve tried looking this up, but every time I do, I obviously am searching for the wrong thing because I have never found the info I’m looking for.
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Christ do I feel old now. CDs and DVDs are read only, so you won’t do anything to them by ripping them. It’s just a copy of the data onto your drive and then probably a compression step of some sort. Nowadays it probably takes less than five minutes for the whole thing. I remember taking at least half an hour on a 2x drive, and then mp3 compression taking another hour or so.
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Discs are harder to ruin than they’re made out to be. My best example is a physical copy of grand theft auto san Andreas for the original Xbox. I got a free old copy that was considered useless, because it wouldn’t read, the shiny side of the disc was scratched pretty deeply. I took it to the game store and told them “I know this probably won’t work, but humor me, run this through the resurfacer please”, which cost me $2. They have a $30,000 machine which actually grinds an even surface on the shiny side, adding a new layer of plastic they said, but it did in fact work first try. I still use that disc to play the game with no issues whatsoever. If anything, it’s the least glitchy copy of GTA I own physically.
If you look at the layers, the shiny side (bottom) of a CD is a thick layer of plastic. The data is actually on the other side of that plastic, protected by a thin sheet of aluminum foil and lacquer on top. Even a deep scratch on the bottom is unlikely to reach the data, so resurfacing should be very effective.
However, a deep scratch on the top can easily puncture the metallic layer and damage the actual data.
DVDs and Blu-ray have extra layers and are a bit more complicated, but it’s a similar design
I learned that data was on the top side at a very young age. I put a sticker on top of a CD and a couple years later peeled it off and the image came off too. I tried to play the CD and realized my mistake. I think I was around 7. Luckily it was just kid’s Christmas songs and nothing important lol.
there’s no way this is a real post. why are people giving real answers to it? I hate Reddit
I was actually serious about this. I may have grown up with DVDs and CDs, but that doesn’t mean I understand how exactly they fully function when ripped. Especially since I grew up in the transition period between everything being on CD/DVD to either moving online or to SD cards.
