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COMPACT DISC

RED BOOK

Red Book, or Compact Disc-Digital Audio (CD-DA), was defined by Philips N.V. and Sony Corporation in 1980.

Data on an audio disc is organized into frames in order to ensure a constant read rate. Each frame consists of 24 bytes of user data, plus synchronization, error correction, and control and display bits.

One of the first crucial things to understand about CD-Audio is that its data is not arranged in distinct physical units. Instead, one frame is interleaved with many other frames so that a scratch or defect in the disc will not destroy a single frame beyond correction. Rather, a scratch will destroy a small portion of many frames.

Red Book disc itself is divided into three areas: Lead In, Program, and Lead Out. Each track's address, is recorded in the disc's TOC(Table of Contents) and is stored in the Lead In area.

Because pressed CDs are read-only, the number and location of the audio tracks to be recorded is known in advance, and the TOC is written to the disc (or more accurately, to the glass master that will be used to create metal stampers to mold discs) in advance of writing the actual audio data. An audio disc can contain up to 99 tracks, which are stored in the Program area.

After the Program area is the Lead Out area, which is simply 90 seconds of silence, or blank sectors. The Lead Out area on an audio disc is essentially just a ham-fisted way to let CD-Audio players know the music is over.

The Red Book specification is the base for all other types of compact disc. Every disc that came after Red Book in the CD family includes the specs of Red Book or refers to them. The physical, logical, and content description details of Red Book are the basic DNA of the compact disc.