Artist who likes word puns a bit too much. Has a soft spot for anime girls that don't show their emotions very much. Please read Mashle and Dandadan! Also Shimeji Simulation.


dog
@dog

Did you know you can actually see where the data is on a CD? It's true!

Take a look at the first image: there's a more reflective part on the outside, and a slightly less reflective part on the inside. The more reflective part is empty, while the other part has the audio. It means you can actually gauge by eye how much data's on a CD. I've done that plenty of times, to guess how long a disc will take to rip.

You can also see gaps between sections of data. That second CD is a multisession disc - a somewhat rare technique used to separate out data more cleanly than just mixing data and audio within a single normal CD session. This is an audio CD with bonus digital contents. The part towards the centre of the disc is music, then a small gap between sessions that contains nothing, followed by more data that has the computer data in the second session.

And now you know! You'll never use this fact, but at least it's there.


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in reply to @dog's post:

I did use this fact! I sometimes recorded stuff on CDs/DVDs, and forget to label them, so just looking at their surface helped me to discern if the disc is empty or not.

Sadly this knowledge now is indeed useless, I don't even have CD/DVD writers now anymore, and there's no point in having a BD writer.

Yep. I haven't had to work with discs in a while. At my job we have approximately 0 devices that have optical drives anymore lol. But when I did, I used to always check the disc visually before running it to see if it even had data on it or not.