What’s the difference between the CD formats?

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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

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The Audio CD format (often known as Red Book audio standard) defined a very specific way of storing audio as a stream of samples. It’s not a filesystem of files, it’s just audio written as a digital stream with a defined table of contents at the beginning.

“MP3 CDs” as described are a filesystem containing files, the playing device must be able to understand that filesystem and to be able to decide the compressed audio files back to a stream that can be sent to a speaker.

A CD image is a file that contains an entire filesystem of a disc in a single file. This format of data storage is particularly convenient when you want to make a disc that, at the software level, is an exact duplicate of the original source.

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