I’m just wondering physically how is it possible? Why is it that if I wanna pick one song from the CD the player ‘knows’ where the song I want is?
In: Technology
Nobody answering the question OP asked.
A CD, or any optical media is made up of a continuous spiral of 1s and 0s represented as reflective flats, and non reflective pits.
At the beginning of the disk is a table of contents of sorts. It tells the system where physically on the media a particular file is. It basically tells the drive that file x starts at sector 423. The drive knows roughly where the laser is physically on the disk, so in order to “seek” to a particular file, it can move the laser and count how many tracks of the spiral it passes over. Once it’s close, it slows down and reads the whole spiral searching for the start of the file. Once the start is found, the data begins to stream from the drive out to the system. From there the file can be played or loaded into memory wholesale and worked on locally.
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