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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > the humble compact disc
 
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Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl

The Management posted:

fun fact, CDs are literal spirals with one long track, not sectors like a hard drive. they are designed to be able to play with no buffering so the bits can go directly from the laser to the DAC. it’s basically a phonograph but with digital encoding.

how do tracks work? i.e. how does the player know where to advance to when you hit 'next track'

* # ¿ Jan 29, 2024 07:04
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# ¿ Sep 19, 2024 18:42
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Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl

The Management posted:

CDs have a table of contents at the start that lists the tracks, kind of like a partition table. however, there are no discrete blocks on audio CDs. instead they use time codes. there is a very low bitrate signal encoded in the data stream that contains the current time (if the disc were one long track including the track number). the table of contents lists the time codes of each track start. your cd player seeks to approximately where that would be on the disc, starts reading, and adjusts itself until it finds the time code it wants.

a cd player doesn’t need to keep track of what the current track is or the time, it can display the track and time codes directly from the disc with no processing. sometimes you’ll see a cd player show -1 seconds before a track starts. that’s literally in the time codes on the disc.

oh cool, thanks!



The Management posted:

CDs were designed to be read by extremely simple ASICs with basically no compute power. like I said, they’re basically phonograph records with digital encoding.

yeah that makes total sense given the time they were conceived/designed for

* # ¿ Feb 1, 2024 00:29
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Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl

graph posted:

lol if you're still not using v700s

i'm still using a set of mdr-v6 headphones i bought off a goon twenty years ago

* # ¿ Feb 11, 2024 03:28
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > the humble compact disc