Audio CD-R vs CD-R

Other than price and the name, what is the difference.

ie are Audio CD-R much more superior to standard CD-R to be worth the difference in price ?

There's a code on Audio CD-R's, that component stereo type recorders need to see, or they won't work. Regular computer blanks don't work without a hardware hack. Audio discs will work fine in computer burners, though, unless they're beginning to sneak changes in I haven't heard of yet. Quality wise, I don't know. Never used any. I'll bet, at least, there's the same old questions for them about who the maker was.


Supposedly the added price is to partly go to the recording artist, but we know better, right? It all goes to those leeches from the RIAA, that same favorite group of book cookers I cheerfully give to whenever I buy a blank cassette to tape my barking llama. ;)

So if I'm just burning my fav audio tracks into compilations etc using my PC, then standard CD-R are ok and no need to use CD-DA ?

Yeah, anything marked CD-R "should" work, but there are always a few with burners and disc brands that don't mix.

CD-DA isn't really an audio file, per se. Those icons are shortcuts, to me anyway. They only show a size of oh, 44bytes?

What you want to have to make your own "favorites" is each song optimally a .wav file at 44100khz at 16bit.

CDA is the same wave format that is on any audio CD and it has to be in that format to play on an entertainment player. If you convert it to a high quality wave file and then convert it back to CDA when you record it you have mostly wasted a lot of time and effort and will not improve the recording in the slightest. You get at least as good a result by recording your favorites CDs in the normal way – either compiling them directly from other CDs or converting directly from MP3s. Any time you record as “Audio” the result is a CDA file. To get the music on CD in pure wave format you would have to record as “Data”. You would not have the odd properties display but you couldn’t play them on your entertainment players either.

The quality of the audio CDs is not any better than regular high quality CDR – just usually more expensive. There isn’t any reason to use them in a computer based burner.

The CD-DA I was refering to was CD-DigitialAudio as opposed to CD-Recordable or CD-ReWritable, ie a media format not a file format.

See the last paragraph at the end of this page http://www.howstuffworks.com/cd3.htm

I admit to confusion here. Since I've never used an "Audio" disc recorder, I always use .wav files at 44100-16 because it's the CD standard, and thought it was lossless. And I've never seen rippers with a CDA option, (not that I've tried very many).

I always convert to .WAV on my HD and then create audio CD and add all the .WAV files.

I've always thought it was lossless, but I read somewhere recently that this is not the case but is apparently what the populous is lead to believe.

Apparently if you copy a CD and then use that copy to create a new copy etc etc etc etc over the time you will lose stuff.

Much like dubbing video tapes but over a longer period of time.

I can't remember where I read it now though.

Nix, this is a useful site:


http://www.cdrfaq.org/

As far as confusion, and why I mentioned those CD-DA's as shortcuts, this is what I had in mind. (Actually those shortcuts show as CDAT's in my Window. Have I confused you any further?) :


"Subject: [2-20] How are WAV/AIFF files converted into Red Book CD audio? (2001/01/25)

There is absolutely nothing special about the audio data encoded on a CD. The only difference between a "raw" 44.1KHz 16-bit stereo WAV file and CD audio is the byte ordering.

It isn't necessary to convert a WAV or AIFF file to a special format to write to a CD, unless you're using a format that your recording software doesn't recognize. For example, some software won't record from MP3 files, or from WAV files that aren't at the correct sampling rate. Similarly, you don't have to do anything special to audio extracted from a CD. It's already in a format that just about anything can understand.

Just put your audio into the correct format -- uncompressed 44.1KHz, 16-bit, stereo, PCM -- and the software you use to write CDs will do the rest. All of the fancy error correction and track indexing stuff happens at a lower level.

Don't get confused by programs (such as Win95 Explorer) that show ".CDA" files. This is just a convenient way to display the audio tracks, not a file format unto itself. See section (2-36)."