[Nicolai P. Zwar]

A sad thing I’ve discovered already is that some of my CD-Rs have lost it since the last time I played them. I tried listening to my CD-R of WAGON TRAIN yesterday, for example, and it has that famous “digital flutter” towards the latter half of the disc

Dang, that sucks. I have been very fortunate… in all the decades, it has happened very rarely that a CD has been affected from “bit rot” (rarely, though it has happened). Even CD-Rs that I burned 25 years ago were still ok last time I checked. I had very few music CDs to begin with though, almost all of my collection was original CDs (except perhaps for a handful of rare specialty stuff). Of those I did have, I transferred them all to ALAC and they were just fine.

Nowadays, I have all my CDs transferred to lossless files, so I may not even know if any of the CDs I have would be affected since I ripped them, as I only play a CD once in a blue moon, maybe once or twice a years, just so that the CD drive part of my HiFi system gets moved now and then. There is no divide between my physical CD collection and my “digital files” collection, they are all “one”.
However, the oldest CDs I bought I have since 1987, and they still played fine last time I tried.