Re: Support .cda as input files

On Fri, 14 Sep 2007 01:10:09 +0200
"Harry Sack" <tranzedudegmail.com> wrote:

> does anybody know why dvd use files for audio and video
but audio cd's not?
> What could be the reason for this?
> e.g. they could make a file for each track and just put
them on an
> audio cd and make cd players compatible with this
format. So for me it
> has always been a mystery why audio cd's work this
way.

My best guess is that at the time CD audio was designed
computers (which had the concept of files and a filesystem)
and audio equipment were pretty much separate camps.

So when the CD audio format was designed the reference the
designers had was the LP record. They made a format that had
a continuous stream of data in a spiral around the disk,
just like the LP has a continous groove, and which can be
divided into "tracks" which hold songs or
movements.  The new part of the CD format was a way to
encode PCM (digital) audio with error correction onto
optical media.

It was only later that the computer industry realised that
the disk could also be used to hold data and, because it was
cheap to make and the player technology was well understood,
would be economicly viable.  So a standard for putting data
"sectors" onto the CD media with extra error
correction was developed and a corresponding standard for
laying out the filesystem within the available storage (ISO
9660).

There is also the fact that a CD player was expected to
implemented in hardware or with a very simple processor so
the format had to be simple.

By the time DVD was being designed (and it's subequent
sucessors to be) CD-ROM has been around for a while and DVD
players were expected to have internal software that could
cope with the complexity of working with a filesystem on the
disk rather than a simple data stream.

Steve.
_______________________________________________
Flac-dev mailing list
Flac-devxiph.org
http:
//lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac-dev

Hi again list,

I have given the matter of supporting .cda as input format
some more 
thought. What I wanted was an easier way to do drag 'n' drop
music files 
from CDs onto the local system and then have those files
encoded with FLAC.

As of now most operating systems displays files on CDs as
.cda. (Which has 
later been clarified not to even be a format.)

I think that what I actually want is for the operating
systems to use .flac 
instead. Similar to what Mac OS X does with .aiff. This
should probably 
have been posted in the advocacy emailing list instead.
-- 
Daniel Aleksandersen
_______________________________________________
Flac-dev mailing list
Flac-devxiph.org
http:
//lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac-dev