maker of tiny games | navigator of retail chaos | artist | FFXIV fan (Ryusui Teira@Brynhildr) | he/him | trans rights are human rights | death to crypto
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
Oh come the fuck on they still sell CDs I knew what fucking vinyl was in 1995
i'm not sure how to feel about the fact that Best Buy no longer sells CDs or movies but still carries vinyl
the move from "CDs" to "MP3 CDs" was wild. My most prized possession as a teen was an MP3-capable CD Walkman
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.
(Also maybe you were just joking around but this came across as really aggressive)
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.
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.
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.
Yeah the thing is I'm actually using vinyl as an analogy for the technical details in one place because I think there's a real chance some readers are more familiar with vinyl than CD.
