Interesting discovery - .wav files in your CD player

[Brad Johnson]

Having never paid attention to it - and not being the kind to play audio CDs on my computer - I never realized that the music files were in .wav format.  Got me to thinking (which is usually very, very dangersous...).  "Self", said I, "does that mean that any file in .wav format can be copied to a CD and played in any CD player?"  Well, Self answered and said, "What the heck, try it!"

The end result, well, let's just say that it DOES work and I now have a whole CD full of Looney Tunes sound clips that I can kick over to and surprise my passengers. 

Brad

p.s. - In case you were wondering, if the .wav file is less than two seconds long Nero won't let you use it in the compilation.

[Harold Tuttle]

some moderne cd players are mp3 compliant

you can put ~an hour (74 minutes) on a cd as audio music files
as mp3s you can stuff 10 hours of music on 1 cdr

to cheap to buy an ipod?
a portable mp3 playing cd diskman is 40 bucks
each cdr can be a 700 meg ipod

http://www.nextag.com/portable-mp3-cd-player/search-html

[zahc]

Not news to the audio-aware.

I would go so far as to say the CD is obsolete, and became obsolete when hard drive space made ripping practical. When the CD was developed, nobody could imagine any other way to store a monstrous 750Mb of data. Nowadays, the same size disc can hold tons more (DVD). On either disc, you can fit more music, even losslessly, on the same disc as data files, and with the current state of technology, a CD player might as well read the CD, then play back the data files from flash memory or a buffer. There is no reason to actually play the music off the disc in real time anymore, and hasn't been for years. It's silly.

[Manedwolf]

Not news to the audio-aware.

I would go so far as to say the CD is obsolete, and became obsolete when hard drive space made ripping practical. When the CD was developed, nobody could imagine any other way to store a monstrous 750Mb of data. Nowadays, the same size disc can hold tons more (DVD). On either disc, you can fit more music, even losslessly, on the same disc as data files, and with the current state of technology, a CD player might as well read the CD, then play back the data files from flash memory or a buffer. There is no reason to actually play the music off the disc in real time anymore, and hasn't been for years. It's silly.

But Redbook audio format is still around, thankfully, because, being 25+ years old, it's impossible to DRM. You can't copy-protect a CD, thus, you're able to rip them.

SACD, which WAS DRM'ed, has failed.

[zahc]

Indeed, the CD has no DRM, because nobody probably thought ripping would be as simple as it has become. I always get my music on CD for that reason, I will not pay for downloads if they are compressed and/or have DRM. I don't actually play the discs though, they are alphabetized on the shelf; I use my computer hooked up to my stereo.

[mfree]

If the .wav is less than two seconds, open up the WAV editor and pad it with silence front and back.

[RocketMan]

I've been wanting to test the CD player in my truck to see if would play mp3s.  I guess I'll have to get off my backside and do it.

[Brad Johnson]

So, is there a "preferred" sampling rate when recording for audio CDs?

Brad

[Vodka7]

44.1 kHz

[RocketMan]

I find that 192kbps works well for me.  My hearing isn't quite good enough to really appreciate that rate, but it doesn't sound as good at 128kbps.
Given that, anything higher than 192kbps would be wasted disk space.  YMMV.

[Brad Johnson]

44.1 kHz

Muchos Gracias!

Brad

[BryanP]

Technically the files on the CD are in CDDA format.   Your copy of Windows shows them as .WAV files in the explorer window and can extract them directly to your hard drive as WAV files.  If you popped it into a Mac they would show as a different format (I'm blanking on the common Mac audio format at the moment).