When burning to a CD-R what is the difference between audio and data?

Answer 1

none of the above are completely correct - If you burn just audio files (usually .wav) to a cd in "burn data disc" setting it will still play in your cd player - The burn doesn't change the format of the file.... The reason the likes of Nero asks if you want to make an audio disk is so that it can "normalise" your files - which means it sets the loudest peak on each file to 0dBu - the maximum sound level before you get clipping and distortion...................

Answer 2

There is NO difference in the physical media. The mechanism is a series of pits in a shiny surface. The pits correspond to 1's and 0's. The difference comes in with the physical device which uses the stream of 1's and 0's read from the disk surface. This is a data stream. From the pickup, the data stream is handled in one way if it is audio and a different way if it is not. The format of the data stream is what actually determines what happens. All CD's have a single spiral track which spirals out from the hub (except for hybrid disks which can have multiple tracks with a blank space between.). Regardless, with either, the single or multiple track, the data is in a spiral from where it starts to where it ends. A single track obviously spans the entire disk. Multiple tracks have blank rings between tracks, but within the track, the data is a spiral. The multiple tracks could also be looked as a spiral track in segments. There exist industry "standards" as to exactly how the data is formatted on the disk for each different type of disk, data, audio, video, whatever.

Answer 3

Creating an audio disc means you make a music CD from which you will have to 'extract' the music every time you insert the CD in a computer. You cannot browse through the music files in an audio CD. However a data disc can hold just about anything, including music, in the form of usual files. You can browse through the files and do usual file functions like copy, paste etc.
:)

Answer 4

Audio tracks are burnt differently on CD to make it compatible with CD players (which are not data drives e.g. the on in your car)

Whereas if you burn data CD then it can not be read by an audio track CD player and can only be used with a computer.

Answer 5

Actually you can burn any type of data onto a CD-R disk. Some CD-R disks are set up for audio and others for data such as word processing, backing up text files etc.

Any CD-R disk will work with either media. I have used the data disks for audio and have no problem with them. Most of my karaoke back up files are on the regular CD-R disks. Now you want to be careful and make sure you don't use the CD-RW disk because those are re-recordable.

Answer 6

Audio CDs support only one session ( can only be written to once ) Data CDs support multiple sessions ( data can be added again. if Audio and data are on the same CD the Audio will have to be put on first.

Answer 7

data burns the actual files, audio is just the music. with a data cd you have to have a higher end cd player to read the cd and play it, whereas audio will play in all cd players

Answer 8

Audio is music converted to the *.cda format which can be played back on stand-alone CD players. It is encoded from the orig. music file like .wav or .mp3.
Data is actual files copied to CD. If the file happens to be say, *.mp3 then a computer or a DVD player can also play that as music. If the data is *.doc then Word can read it, etc. They are copies of the same files that are on your computer. That is why you would choose 'data' when backing up files.

Answer 9

If you burn data, basically you just copy the files. To make a music CD, you have to burn it as audio, otherwise ordinary CD music players won't play it.

Answer 10

i think you can put more music into a cd if you burn it as data.. if you burn music as audio, you can only burn less music because if you pop the audio cd on a cd player, it plays automatically like an original music cd does..i think you cannot do it if you save music as data..