Re: portable CD players
Hi,
mick crane wrote:
> > Does anybody know about these portable CD players like Sony Discman ?
Only from times when music CDs were to be bought in real shops.
> > "stories.m3u" is just a list of mp3 files from librivox.org
> > If I put them on a CD will Discman play them
Brad Rogers wrote:
> Portable CD players of that type are usually audio CD players, they won't
> play .mp3, .ogg, or any other file type, for that matter.
The old non-computer CD drives expect CD-DA sectors, which hold 2352 bytes
each (in contrast to 2048 bytes with CD-ROM). The data format of CD-DA is
similar to Microsoft's WAV with parameters:
uncompressed
44100 Hz sampling rate
16 bits per sample
big endian (i.e. MS-WAV bytes need to be swapped)
stereo (2 channels)
CD burn programs can take such .wav files, strip them of their headers,
and copy them on CD as CD-DA tracks. Tracks are usually numbered in the
range of 1 to 99.
A modern drive might be already a computer in disguise, be able to read
from CD-ROM (aka "data CD"), and to play the popular audio file format
of the computer world. (A quick look by google shows a CD-DA-only "Coby"
for 20+ USD and a MP3 capable "Hott" for 60+ USD.)
> with a menu selection ?
The popular GUI programs (K3B, Brasero, Xfburn, ...) recognize other
audio file formats and employ conversion software like Gstreamer to obtain
the prescribed file format.
With the command line burn backends (cdrdao, cdrecord, wodim, cdrskin)
you will have to provide readily converted .wav files.
Menu information beyond the track number is stored as CD-TEXT.
K3B and Brasero are said to produce it from playlists or from information
which they find in the original non-WAV files or in public data bases.
At least K3B offers the opportunity to edit track titels
https://userbase.kde.org/Special:MyLanguage/K3b/Burn_an_Audio_Cd_with_K3b#Edit_the_title_information
Xfburn probably does not support CD-TEXT because its development froze
before libburn offered this feature.
The backends offer various ways to define CD-TEXT. The most popular one
is the .cue file format, which all the mentioned backends accept.
It does not cover all possible CD-TEXT attribute types but should suffice
for normal needs.
See "Example of a CDRWIN cue sheet file" at the end of
https://dev.lovelyhq.com/libburnia/libburn/raw/master/doc/cdtext.txt
The professional way is/was obviously the Sony Input Sheet. See
"Sony Text File Format" in doc/cd_text.txt. Amon the mentioned backends,
only cdrskin can read it.
There is also the opportunity to re-use a binary copy of the CD-TEXT data
from an existing CD-DA medium. (Beware of copyright ...)
Have a nice day :)
Thomas
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