MP3 CD
Encyclopedia
An MP3 CD is a Compact Disc
Compact Disc
The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...

 (usually a CD-R
CD-R
A CD-R is a variation of the Compact Disc invented by Philips and Sony. CD-R is a Write Once Read Many optical medium, though the whole disk does not have to be entirely written in the same session....

 or CD-RW
CD-RW
A CD-RW is a rewritable optical disc. It was introduced in 1997, and was known as "CD-Writable" during development. It was preceded by the CD-MO, which was never commercially released....

) that contains digital audio
Digital audio
Digital audio is sound reproduction using pulse-code modulation and digital signals. Digital audio systems include analog-to-digital conversion , digital-to-analog conversion , digital storage, processing and transmission components...

 in the MP3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

 file format
File format
A file format is a particular way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file.Since a disk drive, or indeed any computer storage, can store only bits, the computer must have some way of converting information to 0s and 1s and vice-versa. There are different kinds of formats for...

. Discs are written
Optical disc authoring
Optical disc authoring, including DVD and Blu-ray Disc authoring , is the process of assembling source material—video, audio or other data—into the proper logical volume format to then be recorded onto an optical disc .-Process:To burn an optical disc, one usually first creates an...

 in the Yellow Book
Yellow Book (CD standard)
The Yellow Book is the standard that defines the format of CD-ROMs. The Yellow Book, created by Sony and Philips, was the first extension of the Red Book. It is named after one of a set of color-bound books that contain the technical specifications for all CD and CD-ROM formats.-External links:The...

 standard data format (used for CD-ROM
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....

s), as opposed to the Red Book
Red Book (audio CD standard)
Red Book is the standard for audio CDs . It is named after one of the Rainbow Books, a series of books that contain the technical specifications for all CD and CD-ROM formats.The first edition of the Red Book was released in 1980 by Philips and Sony; it was adopted by the Digital Audio Disc...

 standard audio format (used for audio CDs).

MP3 files are supported by many modern CD players, including DVD player
DVD player
A DVD player is a device that plays discs produced under both the DVD-Video and DVD-Audio technical standards, two different and incompatible standards. These devices were invented in 1997 and continue to thrive...

s. In addition, some CD players are also capable of playing other formats, such as Ogg Vorbis and the proprietary Windows Media Audio
Windows Media Audio
Windows Media Audio is an audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft. The name can be used to refer to its audio file format or its audio codecs. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs...

 and ATRAC
ATRAC
Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding is a family of proprietary audio compression algorithms developed by Sony. MiniDisc was the first commercial product to incorporate ATRAC in 1992. ATRAC allowed a relatively small disc like MiniDisc to have the same running time as CD while storing audio...

.

Because of audio data compression, an MP3 CD does not have to spin all of the time, potentially saving battery
Battery (electricity)
An electrical battery is one or more electrochemical cells that convert stored chemical energy into electrical energy. Since the invention of the first battery in 1800 by Alessandro Volta and especially since the technically improved Daniell cell in 1836, batteries have become a common power...

 power, however, decompressing the audio takes more processor time. The song is buffered in random-access memory
Random-access memory
Random access memory is a form of computer data storage. Today, it takes the form of integrated circuits that allow stored data to be accessed in any order with a worst case performance of constant time. Strictly speaking, modern types of DRAM are therefore not random access, as data is read in...

, which also provides protection against skipping.

The number of songs that a disc can hold depends on how the songs are encoded and the length of the songs. A standard audio CD (74 minutes) can hold about 18 songs, a 650-MiB
MIB
MIB may refer to any of several concepts:* Master of International Business, a postgraduate business degree* Melayu Islam Beraja, the adopted national philosophy of Brunei* Motion induced blindness, a visual illusion in peripheral vision...

 data CD (equivalent to 74-minute audio CD) containing mid-quality (160-kb/s) audio files can hold approximately 9.5 hours of music or about 138 songs.

ID3
ID3
ID3 is a metadata container most often used in conjunction with the MP3 audio file format. It allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number, and other information about the file to be stored in the file itself....

 tags stored in MP3 files can be displayed by some players, and some players can search for MP3 files within directories on an MP3 CD. The sound quality
Sound quality
Sound quality is the quality of the audio output from various electronic devices. Sound quality can be defined as the degree of accuracy with which a device records or emits the original sound waves...

 of an MP3 CD is inferior to that of an audio CD, because MP3 compression is lossy.

There is no official standard for how the MP3 files on an MP3 CD are stored on discs. As such, the format expected by different players varies. This sometimes leads to incompatibilities and difficulty in playing discs, often because of filename length limits, sub-directory limits, number of files limits, and special character bugs.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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