artemistAug 1, 2023

Hot take:
The Compact Disc is still the most futuristic audio format. Forget streaming, files, or the vinyl resurgence, CDs output music at near the top of the quality a human can hear by shooting LASERS at a mirror spinning 8 times per second. This somehow just works and you can read a $0.10 disc with a $20 drive.

When I buy music, I prefer to have it on a CD. I can rip it into my computer easily and if I ever lose that copy I can just rip it again, bit perfect every time. There's no subscription and no DRM that can take it away from me, I have a physical thing.

Show threadTóth Gábor BaltazárAug 1, 2023
@artemist
I've read that reading audio CDs bit perfect is actually super hard because it's designed to have interpolation for unrecoverable errors
Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialAug 1, 2023
@tthbaltazar @artemist CIRC is actually pretty great at lossless recovery of errors. it's only when you've got pretty big scratches that it has to interpolate over the UREs.
Show threadTóth Gábor BaltazárAug 1, 2023
@gsuberland @artemist
oh I'm not saying the error correction is bad, I'm saying I've read that it's tricky to figure out if there was unrecoverable errors that got smoothed out
Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialAug 1, 2023
@tthbaltazar @artemist the ATAPI CDROM spec has a thing called the "Read Error Recovery Parameters Page", which lets the host machine specify the way that error correction and error reporting is done. the exact details are pretty complicated but the short of it is that you can tell the drive to either disable interpolation, or report errors only when a URE was interpolated over. on some drives you can even completely disable CIRC and read the data as-is off the disk, regardless of errors.
Show threadGraham Sutherland / Polynomial
@tthbaltazar @artemist not all drives implement every mode (there are like 20 different ones) but the majority of them will at least let you put it in "enable CIRC, but tell me if you correct a URE" mode during audio readout.
Aug 1, 2023 at 7:02amWeb