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Topic: CDs and Computer Files (Windows)

23rd Apr 2017, 10:59 PM
	Whyperion SUBS Too Many Records , Too Little Time Member since Jan 2013 306 Points	Interesting Link. Which may lead one to useful- or useless - freeware links. But it explains, which I will copy here, the problem of playing CDs on computers, which folk might have had in these tablet days of no in-built optical media drives ! CD technology was in short, invented before, if not Personal Computers, certainly before the thought of using (cheap) computers to read and 'play' music CDs. For me I would like to create Music CDs, from my own tapes, but that for now is another matter. http://www.techsupportalert.com/how_to_work_with_audio_cd_cda_files.htm f you view the contents of a music CD from Windows, you'll see that it contains a number of .CDA files each corresponding to a song track. (CDA stands for Compact Disk Audio) why can't one just copy these files to ones PC rather than first having to rip them to .WAV, MP3 or other music files? It's a good question with a simple answer: there are no .CDA files on a CD. In fact, from a Windows perspective, there are no "files" at all. A music CD differs greatly from your hard drive in the way information is stored. Computer hard drives store data in concentric rings called tracks. In contrast, music CDs store data in a continuous spiral starting from the inside of the CD and ending at the outer edge of the CD. Kind of like a vinyl LP in reverse. The format of the data stored on CDs is also quite different; it's a continuous stream of raw digital data rather than a collection of individual files. The reason the data is stored in this strange way is the music CD format was developed in the late 1970s long before the age of the home computer. CDs were designed to be played by specialised CD players and at that time nobody even considered that one day they would be played on a computer. So what are .CDA files that you see on a music CD when you place a CD in your computer's CD tray? These files are created by the Windows CD driver. They are simply representations of the CD audio tracks and are not actually on the CD. Each .CDA file is a kind of a pointer to the location of a specific track on the CD and contains no musical information. CDA files are all 44 bytes in length and each contain track times plus a special Windows shortcut that allows users to access the specific audio tracks. So if .CDA files contain no musical information, what happens if you "copy" a .CDA from an audio CD to your hard drive and then double click it? If the CD is still in the drive then the corresponding track will play from the CD. If you remove the CD you will get an error message. That's because the .CDA file contain no music, it only points to where the music is located on the CD. To work with music tracks on your CD you need first to convert them to .WAV, .MP3 or another file format that computers understand. That's what a CD ripper does and that's why you must use a ripper before you can work with your music files on a computer. Simple as that.