Keeping Your CDs Safe When Travelling
Even with the popularity of portable music players, lots of people still want to listen to music with CD-quality sound. Together with their portable player, they carry their CDs with them when they travel. The same goes to movie DVDs. In addition, people still carry computer files stored in CDs from one place to another despite the widespread use of USB flash drives and external drives.
Indeed, CD ad DVDs are convenient to carry around, but one has to take good care of them while they are in transit. While they are quite resilient, repeated mishandling can do damage. Here are some tips on how to preserve their quality while you are carrying them from one place to another.
Keep your discs in their original cases. If their cases were thrown away or broken, you can place the discs in PVC (polyvinyl chloride) CD bags. These bags have insulated and cushioned sleeves, which protect the discs from extreme temperature, shock, dust and dirt.
Furthermore, to protect the CD's or DVD's read side from fingerprints, it is advisable to take the disc through its centre. But repeated handling can crack or break the centre hub, which causes disc failures. To prevent this, install a metal-reinforced centre-hub label protector in your disc, which is inexpensive and easily available in music stores.
Also have CD repair kits handy. These kits contain polish and a soft cleaning cloth, which are quite useful in eliminating minor scratches to restore full playability. That means you do not have to throw your scratched discs away.
Finally, clean them regularly with soft lint-less cloth and camel-hair brush; photographers use these to clean camera lenses. You can find these in camera supplies stores. Now you can keep your discs running longer!
