The problem is your car stereo probably doesn’t have a clue about compression or decompression. When you play an MP3 file, the software you use decompresses the sound as it’s played. A second of silence, for example, is going to require less data than a second of complex sounds. It uses compression technology to make the file much smaller. MP3 is a compressed format, like almost every other common audio format available for internet downloads and computer use. Every second takes up 176,000 bytes, regardless of whether that’s a second of a symphony, someone speaking, or just silence. Remember that I said that an audio CD is uncompressed. It has a file system, directories, folders and files.īut your car stereo knows nothing about file systems, folders and the like. All it knows is how to stream that raw audio data off of an audio format CD. While your computer can do that it too, it’s also a general-purpose device that understands the format of a data CD.īut that’s not the only difference. The format of a data CD is even similar to the format of your computer’s hard disk. They’re just another media on which you can store files from your computer. If you’ve ever seen blank, 70-minute CDs, these hold roughly 740 megabytes of data – enough for about 70 minutes of sound in audio CD format.ĭata CDs, on the other hand, hold anything.
