PMCD (PreMaster CD) is a specially formatted, recordable Compact Disc designed to be sent to a CD pressing plant for replication. The PreMaster CD format, developed in the early 1990s by the CD-ROM division of Sony, in cooperation with "START Lab Inc." of Tokyo and Sonic Solutions, contained a hidden "PreMaster Cue Sheet" that held the metadata needed for replication that a Red BookCD-DA lacks. The PreMaster CD format made use of the fact that not all data-recording surfaces are specified for use in the Red Book CD-DA or Yellow Book CD-ROM standards. CD transports were not able to recover the data hidden in the Cue Sheet unless commanded to by proprietary software. The Cue Sheet specified a broad range of metadata, including number of channels, per track pre-emphasis status, per track copy protection bit setting, per track ISRC Codes, per disc UPC/EAN, etc.
Despite claims to the contrary, only Sonic Solutions' "Sonic System" software was able to generate PreMaster CDs. PMCDs were subsequently obsoleted by the more modern and generalized DDP specification. Several factors led to the decline of the PreMaster CD standard. First, the CD-R mechanisms that were able to read and write the hidden cue sheet metadata went out of production in the late 1990s. Second, only Laser Beam Recorders or LBRs manufactured by Sony were able to read PMCDs, which limited the formats adoption by replicators.
Many CD replicators now accept regular CD-R discs in place of true PMCDs, which can be created using specialized Audio CD pre-mastering software. Unfortunately, CD-Rs formatted as "Audio CDs", which really are Red Book-formatted Orange Book discs, are not designed for disc replication, only content distribution. The CIRCerror correction used for the audio data on these discs is not as extensive as what is used for CD-ROM or DVD formats so, corruption of the audio data during readout due to dirt or mechanical damage could result in total loss of the audio data. Modern, professional pre-mastering software relies on the DDP format, which protects both the audio data and its associated metadata.
The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then released in October 1982 in Japan and branded as Digital Audio Compact Disc.
Waveform Audio File Format is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on personal computers. It is the main format used on Microsoft Windows systems for uncompressed audio. The usual bitstream encoding is the linear pulse-code modulation (LPCM) format.
An optical disc is a flat, usually disc-shaped object that stores information in the form of physical variations on its surface that can be read with the aid of a beam of light. Optical discs can be reflective, where the light source and detector are on the same side of the disc, or transmissive, where light shines through the disc to be detected on the other side.
Compact Disc Digital Audio, also known as Digital Audio Compact Disc or simply as Audio CD, is the standard format for audio compact discs. The standard is defined in the Red Book, one of a series of Rainbow Books that contain the technical specifications for all CD formats.
Video CD is a home video format and the first format for distributing films on standard 120 mm (4.7 in) optical discs. The format was widely adopted in Southeast Asia, South Asia, East Asia, Central Asia and West Asia, superseding the VHS and Betamax systems in the regions until DVD-Video finally became affordable in the first decade of the 21st century.
MiniDisc (MD) is an erasable magneto-optical disc-based data storage format offering a capacity of 60, 74, and later, 80 minutes of digitized audio.
In computing, an optical disc drive is a disc drive that uses laser light or electromagnetic waves within or near the visible light spectrum as part of the process of reading or writing data to or from optical discs. Some drives can only read from certain discs, but recent drives can both read and record, also called burners or writers. Compact discs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs are common types of optical media which can be read and recorded by such drives.
An optical disc image is a disk image that contains everything that would be written to an optical disc, disk sector by disc sector, including the optical disc file system. ISO images contain the binary image of an optical media file system, including the data in its files in binary format, copied exactly as they were stored on the disc. The data inside the ISO image will be structured according to the file system that was used on the optical disc from which it was created.
Copy Control was the generic name of a copy prevention system, used from 2001 until 2006 on several digital audio disc releases by EMI Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment in several regions. It should not be confused with the CopyControl computer software copy protection system introduced by Microcosm Ltd in 1989.
Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks, such that relative time distances in the original audio source are preserved over track boundaries on playback. For this to be useful, other artifacts at track boundaries should not be severed either. Gapless playback is common with compact discs, gramophone records, or tapes, but is not always available with other formats that employ compressed digital audio. The absence of gapless playback is a source of annoyance to listeners of music where tracks are meant to segue into each other, such as some classical music, progressive rock, concept albums, electronic music, and live recordings with audience noise between tracks.
Mini CDs, or pocket CDs, are CDs with a smaller diameter and one-third the storage capacity of a standard 120 mm disc.
CD/DVD copy protection is a blanket term for various methods of copy protection for CDs and DVDs. Such methods include DRM, CD-checks, Dummy Files, illegal tables of contents, over-sizing or over-burning the CD, physical errors and bad sectors. Many protection schemes rely on breaking compliance with CD and DVD standards, leading to playback problems on some devices.
A cue sheet, or cue file, is a metadata file which describes how the tracks of a CD or DVD are laid out. Cue sheets are stored as plain text files and commonly have a .cue filename extension. CDRWIN first introduced cue sheets, which are now supported by many optical disc authoring applications and media players.
IMG, in computing, refers to binary files with the .img filename extension that store raw disk images of floppy disks, hard drives, and optical discs or a bitmap image – .img.
A mixed mode CD is a Compact Disc which contains both data and audio in one session. Typically the first track is a data track while the rest are audio tracks. The most common use for mixed mode CDs is to add CD-quality audio to video games on a CD.
CD-RW is a digital optical disc storage format introduced in 1997. A CD-RW compact disc (CD-RWs) can be written, read, erased, and re-written.
Media Descriptor File (MDF) is a proprietary disc image file format developed for Alcohol 120%, an optical disc authoring program. Daemon Tools, CDemu, MagicISO, PowerDVD, and WinCDEmu can also read the MDF format. A disc image is a computer file replica of the computer files and file system of an optical disc.
A CD-ROM is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both computer data and audio with the latter capable of being played on a CD player, while data is only usable on a computer.
Disc Description Protocol (DDP) is a format for specifying the content of optical discs, including CDs and DVDs.
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