Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Yes, I said it, and I meant it!

For those of you who have newer cars, or got an upgraded CD/Radio combination for your car, you should NEVER put your original CDs in your car. Why?

• The heat of the car in the summer and winter (when your console heater is on) is going to cause your CD to degrade (over a long period, but still it isn’t that good).
• Lots of “snatch and grab” thieves take CDs from cars these days, you could lose $130.00 worth of CDs if they take 10!
• If your car CD player goes wonky you can have badly scratched CDs (i.e. you lose them)
• This happened to us 2 years ago. We have a 6 CD exchanger in the van, and it just went “south” and we couldn’t get any CDs out of it. It finally got fixed but a few of the CDs were ruined, but LUCKILY, they were duplicates I had made.
• If your house gets broken into, you have back up copies in your car too.

No, I am not espousing Music sharing or silliness like that, but it is your right under copyright laws to make backup copies of your media for your own use (at least in Canada and the US). I use Roxio Easy CD on my PC to duplicate my CDs, but you can use NERO or many other pieces of software to do it.

Word of warning however, SONY has put a nasty little piece of software on their new music CDs to stop you from being able to back them up (and presumably able to share them as well). I suggest avoiding SONY CDs like this library did.

If a CD costs $13.00, to duplicate it costs about 20 cents in media (a small price to pay).

–C8j