So I was watching this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkIR23emsWY) by technology connections and I just realized that I have no idea how CDs work. The video is about how some CD players can read audio of a CD where the data is just copied directly onto a CD with a computer whereas older players only had hardware compatible with CDs formatted as …. digital audio?
I was trying to figure it out on wikipedia, how is a commercial CD you’d buy in a store different from a CD with files copies onto it?
I remember my dad used to use a burning tool to make images. Why are they called images? How is an image different from a CD?
Why are some CDs readable and writable but some aren’t?
In: Technology
Man I feel old.
The official CD albums had an uncompressed, digital representation of the music you’d listen to. Think bars instead of a wave. It tells the speaker what signal to output as it reads through it.
MP3 files tossed into a CD on a home computer worked differently. More like read only storage; it had a file system, with a list of the contents, maybe even folders, and the mp3s just tossed on there as files. The most basic CD players couldn’t understand any of this, they were just expecting a sequence of bars to convert into a digital signal.
> I remember my dad used to use a burning tool to make images. Why are they called images? How is an image different from a CD?
An image in this context is a file representation of a storage media. A CD in file form, basically. The burner takes all your songs and creates an image, that then gets burned into the CD.
> Why are some CDs readable and writable but some aren’t?
CD burning is just that: the laser on the reader is physically burning the disk’s surface as it writes to it.
A writable CD needs certain chemical properties to be able to be rewriten. A read-only disk physically couldn’t be written into again because you couldn’t “erase” the old information from it, short of rendering it useless by “burning” its entire surface.
Some early rewritable disks could only be burned a certain number of times before they would go bad.
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