[Jools]

Over the weekend I was mucking out the cupboard under the stairs (yeah I live a truly exciting life...much better than going to Assen)

Anyhow, I found a whole bunch of long lost, forgotten CD's that were in truly dreadful condition. Out of their cases, covered in dust, scratched to buggery they almost went straight in the bin liner. But I thought I'd see if they'd play so I boshed em in with the washing up to get the years of dust off them and wiped em with a tea towel. Put one of the cleanest, least scratched ones in the CD player....no chance wouldn't even read the track list.

Then I bunged em in my PC and imported them into iTunes which seemed to be able to read the track lists at least. As they were importing, the DVD writer was going beserk with retries, but they did import.

When I played them back on iTunes, the track would start then a few seconds silence, then a bar or two of music then a stuttering silence. Oh well, worth a try I thought but there's obviously only so much that technology can do to rescue CD's which became coasters long ago, and left it at that.

Came down this morning to find Mrs Jools playing "Swagger", The Blue Aeroplanes album which was one of the CD's I'd tried to rescue and one of my favourite albums. This album was one of the ones I'd tried to play with no success yesterday, but now overnight and after a reboot all of these written off CD's are playing perfectly in iTunes.

I suppose the techies will tell me about error correction and stuff, but as far as I'm concerned, it's magic.