Questions tagged [compact-disc]

Compact Disc or CD is a type of optical physical media that can hold digital data (data, music, video). Standard CDs can hold up to 700MB of data, or 80 minutes of audio if converted to an audio-CD.

515 questions
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What is the shelf life of unused/unburned CD-R/CD-RW disks?

I have a lot of old unused/unburned CD-R/CD-RW media. Are there published test results documenting the expected shelf life of this type of media?
mdpc
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How to destroy files (make unreadable) from a CD-R

I have a CD which has data written to it. Note: It's not multisession. I want to know if it is possible to make a certain subset of files on the CD unreadable using a CD-RW drive somehow. I guess hypothetically if I knew which sectors on the CD…
phininity
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Reading Data from the Entire Surface of a CD, DVD

Is it possible to retrieve data from the entire surface of a compact disc. Suppose a CD written with 300MB of data where the remaining 400MB is blank. Normally, computer doesn't bother with the 400MB region when reading it because the filesystem…
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CD read speed issues on Vista

I have a disc for a old game (IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles) that during installation, took a ridiculously long time to install on my Windows Vista laptop (we're talking the progress bar moving 10% in one hour). While the game was installing,…
Macha
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How to burn visible image/text on data side of CD-R

This may be a very strange question. I noticed that a burned CD-R and an empty CD-R is different if you watch the recording surface carefully. Now I want to burn some words (visible to human but not CD drives) on the disk. So I tried to use a marker…
james
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How can I tell how many data tracks are on a CD?

I know data CDs can have multiple tracks as a result of adding/deleting or modifying files in additions burns to the disk. (I guess they aren't track but rather sessions or some such thing?) I need to know how many there are (well really I need to…
Justin808
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What is stored in the first two seconds of a CD-ROM?

When I run cd-info on Linux I always get these tracks: CD-ROM Track List (1 - 1) #: MSF LSN Type Green? Copy? 1: 00:02:00 000000 data false no 170: 68:17:27 307152 leadout (688 MB raw, 599 MB formatted) As you can see there…
zomega
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Could cd-r unused space on completed (finalized) disc be utilized?

The r writable layer is permanently distorted during the write stage and it can never be re-written, but what about the unused area? I see the data from the outermost edge of the disc toward the center but I don't see any alteration in the remaining…
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How do I find the name of an album from the cd?

I was going to write a script which checks the currently entered cd against a list of albums. I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but I don't know how to get the album's name from its cd. I know this is possible, because I can view…