mothcompute

great osdev actually 🏳️‍⚧️

@mothcompute

real internet bug

guys help im frozen in time

i post more on my FediPub Activityverse: @mothcompute@vixen.zone it is where i talk about all my fun projects

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mothcompute
@mothcompute
sirocyl
@sirocyl
dog
@dog

Realizing I have to explain what "CD audio" is and how that's different from "files on a CD" for my new blog post, because a bunch of potential readers are too young to have encountered it the first time around

the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi
@the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

Oh come the fuck on they still sell CDs I knew what fucking vinyl was in 1995

DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

yeah but a lot of people didn't understand CDDA even at its height. The number of times I had to handhold someone through converting some MP3s to a CD CUE + WAV files because they tried just slopping them onto a disc and were perplexed as to why it didn't work in their CD player

MorningSong
@MorningSong

My (Generally very technically capable) mother, once she got ahold of napster, started burning dozens of CDs with music and audiobooks and when we were on a long car trip and she wanted to listen to one, we popped it into my CD player

And whoops. She'd made them all UDF. So she got to put up with Two Mix and Initial D OST tracks for that trip.

sirocyl
@sirocyl

I blame the PC for surfacing this assumption.

Windows since 95, Mac OS X, and even Linux under KDE3, would show a "virtual" filesystem under the CD drive.

  • On Windows, the only contents in Explorer were links to the track on disc, .cda files, which contained no audio. I think the contents were a disc ISSN, track number, track length, disc timestamp and frame to begin playing from (TOC fragments, basically). I can only presume that this was a concession to the music industry, as the multimedia PC geared up, to stave off the inevitable ubiquity of CD ripping; but there's also the technical limitation, that early CD-ROM drives absolutely could not route digital audio to the host PC — again, likely with the music industry snorting down the backs of the drive manufacturers' collective necks.
  • On OS X, and I think on OS 8 and 9, the CD shows in Finder as a drive containing WAVE files; you could rip a CD by copying them off, and then iTunes came around and you could rip CDs to AAC, saving storage space.
  • On KDE 3, an audio CD would enumerate in computer:/// under Konqueror as a KIO-slave (woefully dated terminology even for 2005) called cdaudio:/// or cd-da:/// (I think it was both) and that would show the tracks on the disc in wav format. In fact, I think cd-da gave you wav's and a cue; while cdaudio gave you folders called /WAV, /Vorbis, /FLAC etc., and would use KDE technologies to translate and rip the audio.

And when CD burning came around, the same interface - your file browser - could be used to burn a CD-ROM! So, people would assume that dragging those files they just ripped - or any audio files - to a CD would "automagically" make an audio disc out of them.

I think Windows XP and Mac OS X Panther introduced a molly-guard - if music files are being copied to the burn queue, stop the user and ask if they'd like to burn a music CD instead, and then open Windows Media Player/iTunes to do the work in.

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in reply to @dog's post:

in reply to @the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi's post:

dog
@dog

I mean they still sell CDs but not that many people have a CD player anymore. Neither my mom nor my brother have one anymore, so I ended up inheriting my dad's entire CD collection because there was no one else who could use them. I can easily see someone in their late teens or early 20s never having used a CD and not being familiar with what makes "tracks on a CD" different from "files" in a technical sense.

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the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi
@the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

Sorry -- I didn't mean to be too aggressive, it's just been in my nature to adopt a more sardonic and aggrieved voice online. Think like oscar the grouch (or possibly diogenes); you are actually allowed to hang out by my trash can.

That said, that's a fair point you're making -- even I do sometimes like to think about CD audio tracks as being low-key like files, even if the formatting is different enough that it's more of an abstraction when you open up an audio CD on a computer file browser.

I guess in that sense I'd compare it maybe to a compressed file -- like, there's definitely a clear structure to how its contents are laid out, but it took a while for it to be built into windows because the act of compression meant it used a very different standard for encoding that information than what an uncompressed windows file would.

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dog
@dog

Ahh, yeah, I get what you mean. I’ve had enough rude comments/QRTs on Twitter over the years that I assume that kind of reply actually means what it says.

And yeah - this is a technical blog post, so the details of how it works is actually important. In this case the “non-file”ishness where you can index into arbitrary points of the disc is actually relevant so I’m probably bringing up vinyl as an example - actually seems more likely people have dropped a needle on a record more recently than looked at the time codes on a CD player.

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the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi
@the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

Argh, I'm sorry to hear that. Generally discourse on this site is charitable enough that I end up filtering my smart remarks less than I would most other places, but the rest of the internet being what it is doesn't change.

Ironically, in that context the best analog I can think of is a wave file, but without a format header because you know it's always going to be 44.1kHz and 16-bit, so you know what time it is at an arbitrary byte offset -- and that's basically how a cue sheet works, I realize as I was typing it out.

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in reply to @DecayWTF's post: