I bought a used CD today I'd never seen before, Paul Halley's "Angels on a Stone Wall." It features Paul Winter & his Consort backing Halley (and you know how I love Paul Winter).
When I got it home however the first track had some skipping -- and digital skipping is nasty -- and the second track wouldn't play at all. Looking at the disc there's no evidence of great damage, just a couple of small scuffs on the inside grooves (CDs play from the inside out) that should've played through. Huh. Cleaned it thoroughly, tried again, same problem. Decided to try importing it to my computer -- computers will keep trying to read a damaged track until either it's successfully patched together, or the software declares it unreadable.
After an hour of chugging away on the second track (0:58 in) I aborted the import.
Luckily the CD is available on iTunes, so I bought track #2 ($0.99) and imported tracks 3-10 from the disc, which played fine. However on playback I discovered that track #1 still skipped -- the computer had imported the skips right along with the music -- never seen THAT before. Neato. So I bought an error-free copy of track #1 and reburned.
While I was doing that I put on another CD I bought, brand new, Jon Hassell's latest "Listening to Pictures." Hassell's a long-time favorite of mine (about my age), a trumpeter who plays on top of all sorts of weird ethnic and electronic musicians. On this latest one he's got some young dudes backing him -- and their schtick is that common thing EM producers do these days, where they throw in all sorts of digital distortion and what sounds like skipping*. I. WAS. NOT. AMUSED. In fact I had to put in another known good disc to make sure my player was okay!
Luckily it was, and my new CD-R of the repaired Halley plays just fine.
* - Another gimmick a lot of producers like to do is add LP scratches and surface noise. I guess the perfect sound of CDs is screaming out to be fucked with. I guess?