ÿþ<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>CD Writers</TITLE></HEAD> <HR> <Font Size=+2>CD Writers</Font> <Hr> When CDs first came out, people were able to listen to Music with better quality and sound. Phonograph records often got scratched and unlike a CD, the scratch would serouly degrade the sound quality. Tapes lose quality if over time if You listen to them over and over. But CDs gave sound and were durable. Unlike tapes or floppy, they could get wet or dirty, but You could clean them and they'd work fine. The one thing that kept tapes on the shelves was that You could record on them. Recording on a CD meant making a mold and stamping it. Unfortunately, that was very expensive. <P> It wasn't until the mid to late 1990s that Writable CDs entered the picture. At first I head of Minidisk, but tha's something different and the player is separate. People wanted to record there own music or data on CD so it can be used to CD-ROMs and CD-Players. Well, with CD Writers on the store shelves, CDs are quickly driving audio cassettes off the shelves. People prefer CDs because as we said, they're more durable. Their are even two types of CDs -- Recordable and Rewritable. Recordable means they can be written to once. Rewritable, as the name suggests, can e erased and written to many times. If it weren't for Rewritable, we'd have to keep buying Recordable disks. Rewritable is only compatable in new CD-Players and CD-Roms, but they're more versatile. <P> Recording on a CD is much different than recording on a tape. First, You can manually record, but You <i>can't</i> erase it if it's recordable. Thus the writer etches the digital information on the CD. Still with the rewritable, You can't just jump the a spot on the CD and record over, You have to erase the track. Another thing is they need to be <i>Finalized</i>. For audio this means that You write the track information. For data it simply means You make the CD unrecordable (You'd have to erase it if it was ReWritable.) You can't record more stuff on a finalized CD because, thet track information is already on the CD. Even if You could, a standard CD Player would ignore the additional tracks. <P> CD Writers open the door to a technolgy called MP3 CD Players. Where You can store only 80 Minutes of regular Audio, You can store hundreds of MP3s and play them in this special CD Player for hours of Music. A CD full of MP3s You've downloaded is like a Jukebox. <P> Still one catch with CDs is that their are CDs that record in every CD Writer and then CDs that will work in Computers (and not those Component CD Writers) because of a tax to pay the royties of Copyright Holders. In most cases these CD cost a little more, but I've seen the price for these CDs drop that they match the price of Computer Only CDs. Even though these CD say "For Music or Audio use Only" they work fine in Computer CD Writers, too. So now that prices match, production of Computer only CDs should stop. I'll bet consumers are stymied because they buy CDs only to find they won't record. <Hr> <a href="universe.htm">Return to the list of characters<a><br> <a href="index.htm">Go to My main webpage</a> </BODY></HTML>