If a Cd-R holds 700 Mb of data, why can't you burn 700 Mb worth of music to it? which would be about 140 songs

Question

I am making the assumption that each song is roughly 5 Mb in size. if a CD can hold 700 Mb of data, why won't it hold 140 songs?

Answer 1

A friend loaned me a home made CD with 215 tunes on it, averaging about ''3 minutes'' per song, so its possible

Answer 2

First off, I know you probably know this, but are you burning music as MP3s or as CDAs (CD Audio)? CDA is like burning the music like etching tracks on a winyl record (playing as it is read), as compared to MP3s, which are compressed formats (read file, store in memory, play from there). CDA takes a lot more space than MP3s (e.g. A 700MB CD-R can contain approx 80 minutes of CDA, but can also store hundreds of MP3s, bit-rate dependent, of course).

700MB CD-Rs could hold (theoretically) 700 MB (note: capital B means byte, small b means bit, 1 byte = 8 bits) worth of MP3s. Of course, you'd have to have an mp3-capable CD player.

Then again, if you're asking why you can't burn 700MB worth of data onto a disc when it's labeled (labelled? Not sure XD) 700MB, that's a different story.

Although they've got 700MB on the label, the actual capacity of the disc may vary. As a general rule, give or take 1-5 % of the label's capacity. This is a result of manufacturing processes, as well as the size of lead-ins and lead-outs burned onto a disc (these allow a disc to be read).

If you're multisessioning the disc (burning multiple times, not simultaneously), the leads-in and leads-out will be significantly larger than a single burn session.

Answer 3

you can, you can burn an mp3 cd which will hole 700 mbs of music, but that can only be played on a cd player that plays mp3 cds, which most cd players do.