On Tue, 13 Mar 2001, Romain Lerallut wrote: > Funny that the behavior of the CD drive is so different in the audio > mode than in the data mode.
It isn't really. Data CD's contain data headers that help the drive position itself in arbitrary locations - similar to sector headers on floppy and hard disks. Audio CD's contain only vague information. They aren't designed to seek so precisely. Furthermore audio CD sectors are a different size from data CD sectors. When you try to seek somewhere on an audio CD, you can rig the CDROM to do it, but you will not have the required information to "aim" precisely. And, you can read only a few sectors at a time. With a data CD you can tell the CDROM drive which blocks you want and it will just go get them. With an audio CD, you give it coordinates on the disk, it will go somewhere in that area and return a few blocks. Then you have some small amount of time to get the next read request in before the drive loses its "place" and you have to start the whole seek process over again. All in all it is very difficult to treat audio CD's as data and this is why CD rippers are so hard to write (and so slow).
