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| 23rd Apr 2017, 10:59 PM | #1 REPORT | |
 | 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. |
| 24th Apr 2017, 6:24 PM | #2 REPORT | |
 | TopPopper Member since Mar 2013 2612 Points | There is no reason why a PC cannot be configured to automatically rip a CD track using the copy/paste function. It's a computer, for heaven's sake! It can do much, much more complex stuff than that. Computer experts are sometimes so deeply up to their necks in their technology, they lose sight of plain and simple common sense. They configure software so you have to do ridiculous things like make a playlist, import the playlist, un-re-order the tracks it's muddled up for you and then go through whole burny process which stuffs your music in some folder buried in the bowels of your hard drive. Good god! Just set them up to copy/paste the tracks into a folder! The computer knows how to do it. Experts think up reasons why it can't be done. |
| 24th Apr 2017, 7:49 PM | #3 REPORT | |
 | Magic Marmalade If you're not lost... It's not an adventure! Member since Jun 2014 3774 Points Moderator | CDs have something like five times the level of detail than the maximum mp3 size of 320kbs... SACD has something like 10 times that, making the same proportional level of info. ..but from what I've gleaned, the real problem is the rate at which the computer can process this volume of data... you CD player is dedicated to effectively "streaming" this vast quantity of info per second in real time. The computer, making a file, only has the capacity to interpret that info when you rip, and make as close an approximation of that volume of info as it can, and to the degree that it can process it per second. Nowhere near what a dedicated CD Player can do, even on it's best day! -and of course, it being a question of "resolution", how much of the sound is chopped into how many little pieces to make the whole, and therefore, how many of those bits can be played through at once... they both suffer in comparison to tape and vinyl, being analogue... effectively infinite resolution. |
| 26th Apr 2017, 3:44 AM | #4 REPORT | |
| Pridesale🍰 Member since Mar 2013 805 Points | The discussion was not about ripping to another destination - computers can do that ( one of mine runsaway and adds it to itunes folders without my asking, and windows came with bundled software to do it (but I think they ceased doing that)). I liked the old Real Player and its related software, did the job good enough. But it is difficult to replicate a CD to CD without loss of bitrates - although the CDs must have been created in first place using a digital system. Ignoring copy-protection ethics and practicallity it does make the point that copy/paste files does not work in a normal file explorer program / utility because of how audio CDs are created commercially, it probably shows too the difficulty of creating ones own CDs to play in the now current assortment of CD players and readers (although I think CD is so out of things with mini SDcards holding so much more data just as an example. |
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Vinyl Albums : Live Music : 78 RPM : CD Albums : CD Singles : 12" Singles : 7" Singles : Tape Media : Classical Music : Music Memorabilia : Cinema : TV Series : DVD & Blu-ray : Magazines : Books : Video Games : Create Your Own World
Latest » Items : Comments : Price Guide : Reviews : Ratings : Images : Lists : Videos : Tags : Collected : Wanted : Top 50 : Random
45cat for 7" singles : 45worlds for music, movies, books etc : 45spaces for hundreds more worlds