You can keep your digital hell

[venta]

An appeal to the technical cognoscenti:

A while ago, I bought some CD-Rs, made by Memorex, which claimed to be "audio compact discs" and warn on the packet, in big letters, "for music only".

Sadly, at the point of purchase, I failed to notice that they were CD-RWs - suitable for music they may be, but they won't play in the majority of CD players.

I'm now in need of a generic blank CD to put a data file on (it is, in fact, the bit of graphics I was faffing about with last night). Now, is it OK to disregard the large "for music only" warning ? I'm inclined to assume that the discs probably aren't much different from normal - and, while they may be in some way optimised for music (how?), they'll probably do just fine as data discs really.

Anyone have any idea ?

Comments

[wimble.livejournal.com]

I've a general paranoia about R/W disks. It may be out of date as the technology has stabalised, but my impression is that it's risky reading the disk back on a different drive than the one that wrote it (and some CD readers simply can't read rewritable disks at all).

I've also read one article which suggested that, for best results, the data should be written as slowly as possible. The reason for this is that the data should be stored as a series of vertically sided pits in the CD material. Since it takes a finite amount of time to create the pit, and the disk is constantly revolving, this is impossible. The faster the disk spins, the less vertical the edges are.

I don't know what level of error this can produce though, and I suppose there are counter arguments that say you should right the disk a fast as possible (before your arm gets tired and you drop the writer, for example ;-)