I just got live Cd "Red Hat Band (members of famous Calico) from Ireland from xxx netdealer.
Unsealed, lots of scracthes on it, few pices sounds ok ,but rest of cd fullof dig errors/ falses.Idoesn’t work atall in my old cd player.
Overall look like “homeburnt”.Covers were ok.
Anybody else got thiskinda stuff, or is this normally like smallbudget liverecording ?
I’ve gotten a number of CD’s directly from the people playing on them. I assume their budget was quite small. They’ve always been absolutely perfect. I would be very unhappy with the CD you describe. My CD’s aren’t live recordings, as in at a concert, so I guess there could be something I don’t know about that. But that wouldn’t mean the CD should have scratches on it and the like.
A recording engineer told me that a polish with ‘Brasso’ (liquid brass polish) works well to eliminate scratches and restore playability. Works well - I do it all the time with DVDs and CDs I rent from the Video library and which tend to skip or get stuck just prior to the suspensful ending. Wouldn’t want to polish it too much as eventually you’ll wear the protective coating away but as a once-off to get it smooth again. Have a go.
turtlewax works well too; just remember to wipe in a straight line from inside to outside
Right, do not wipe in a circular motion, as that will confuse the laser tracking more.
Got no reply from that firm yet. I understand if cd’s are for sale as second hand, but if I pay 20euros to get new, "legal made cd " i assume that it will be new one. I don’t want to repair any scratches after somebody else.
Yes, I forgot to mention that bit 
I find that some of the ‘ahem’ movies i rent out seem to a bit fuzzy in certain ‘scenes’! maybe it is from continuous pausing/rewinding/playing!!
I also find wiping from the inside towards the outside definitely is the way to go!! 
It stinks when something is advertised as new and comes to you in such poor condition. You shouldn’t have to re-work what you buy to make it function, unless that was understood in the bargain. Have you contacted the seller to complain?
Off topic but, I used to rent DVD’s from a shop in my town. They always had to be cleaned before playing because they had some crusty, white mystery substance on them. As they were not “adult” movies, I couldn’t explain this crusty stuff on them. One day I walked in and brought the empty cases from the racks to have my rentals filled. Then I saw a rather rotund woman behind the register shoveling back glazed donuts like a bucket dredger. She reached under the counter to get the movies out of the drawer without even wiping her fingers of sugary donut glaze. Mystery solved…customer lost. Thank God for Netflix.
It sounds like a homeburnt CD burned at a too-fast rate. That will usualy end up inflicting a lot of digital errors on the CD. I’d suggest returning it and asking the person who burned it to burn it at a much lower speed. It still probably won’t play in your older CD player. Some CD players just won’t work with some home-burnt CDs.
Dionys
Remind the person to ‘finalize’ the disc - if they have any idea what you’re talking about. Newer CD players can sometimes play CDs that haven’t been finalized, or even mp3 data CDs, but the older ones definitely can’t.
Bill
Whether it is cassette tapes or CDs, the ‘normal’ speed for duplicating is advised and not high-speed. Commercial-duty machines do a better job, in any event, than home-consumer models.
Commercially-produced CDs are made by a different process from ‘burning’ and last indefinately, whereas burning as we know it, simply changes the sttucture of the different dyes within the plastic layers of the CD and these dyes are prone to change over a period of time such that within 10 years, a home-burned CD is on its way to becoming unplayable. So it means it is a good idea to re-burn you home jobs every 5 -10 years.