Driving to work I slotted in a CD which has only been played once in my wife’s car where it worked perfectly! When I got to work I had a look and there are some pretty nasty scratches. Which left me wondering how do you get scratches out of CD’s?

I look took a look at Amazon which revealed some pretty scathing comments regarding commercially available products.

This product will not fix your discs. It claims to fix deep scratches but it can’t! Do not buy this product, it is a waste of time any money. I have sent this back to Amazon to get a refund.

This product is awful. It literally uses sandpaper to remove scratches on the CD/DVD. It completely destroyed my CD. The polishing pad did not polish it one bit. Luckily, I tested it on an old worthless one. Straight in the bin it went!

This product is great, if you want to make coasters out of DVDs. They are good for nothing more after having been run through the device!

That said some of the more expensive products had a mixture of scathing and compliment reviews. On balance of reviews the SkipDr Premier (Automatic) looks about the best, but £24 is a fair amount of money to pay for something that might completely destroy a CD! Especially as the machines only good for around 50 discs and one of the positive reviews suggests you’ll need to run a disc though around 20 times – which means that’s just two discs making it look an expensive gamble.

Independent reviews of machines are hard to come-by and an up to date review even less so – I guess a lot of people just don’t use discs anymore! PC Mag picks the Alera DVD/CD Disc Repair Plus as it’s “Editor’s Choice” but that’s back in 2005 – the machine doesn’t appear to be available anymore although something by Aleratec looks remarkably similar as does the manufactures’ name come to that – it’s available at Amazon with one appalling review – although checking the USA Amazon site reveals a more even spilt between good and bad – however it is considerably more expensive than the SkipDr machine.

Overall I’d have to say a machine is no better than a 50-50 bet.

WikiHow has a pretty comprehensive article on How to Fix a Scratched CD and includes a video showing how to use toothpaste – which is certainly a cheaper option than a commercial machine.

Burning Issues carried out a test of various CD repair options – although I don’t believe it has been published since 2007! And this article appears to be from December 2000 – the interesting point is how well Brasso (Wikipedia has instructions on using Brasso) performed against commercial machines and how poor toothpaste performed which isn’t what wikiHow suggests as this table shows (Note many of the specialist product are no longer available).

CD Repair Table Collated from Burning Issue - click table to enlarge

The wikiHow article had one suggestion that made a lot more sense.

Have the CD professionally refinished. If the disc still doesn’t play correctly, bring it in to a music store (especially one that sells used CDs) or a DVD rental store and ask if they can repair the disc for you. Many of these businesses have CD refinishing machines that do a remarkable job, and they’ll probably charge you less than five dollars to repair the CD.

The website Total Disc Repair which as well as supplying disc repair machines costing from £300 upwards also has a link to Play Like New where you can type in your post code and find a local disc repairer – there’s also a couple of links to online specialists.

Back to my original problem – I’m going to use a lens cleaner on my car’s CD player – I don’t think I’ve done it since I got the car – nearly three years ago. And if I need to get a CD repaired I think I’ll try out one of the local disc repairers.