76
DISCRIBE CD Mastering Software
CD-DA Compact Disc-Digital Audio. Jointly devel-
oped by Philips and Sony and launched in 1983, CD-
DA is the first and most popular incarnation of the
compact disc, used to digitally record and play back
music at unprecedented quality. It has gained world-
wide acceptance as a standard to which all digital au-
dio CD discs and CD drives adhere. Philips/Sony’s
CD-DA standard is known as the Red book.
CD-Erasable (CD-E) Predecessor to CD-ReWritable.
The products are exactly the same, but the name was
officially changed in 1994 to CD-ReWritable.
CD-Extra See Enhanced CD
CD-I Compact Disc-Interactive, Philips’ entry into
the consumer Compact Disc market. It is a compact
disc format designed to allow interactive multimedia
application to be played through a small computer/disc
player on a home television screen. Especially good
real-time animation, video, and sound. The CD-I stan-
dard is also known as the Green Book.
CD-I Ready A set of specifications which define a
way of recording
CD-I information on a CD-DA disc.
CD-Plus See Enhanced CD
CD-MO Compact Disc-Magneto Optical systems are
used as high-density storage media. They have an ac-
cess speed slower than a magnetic hard disk but faster
than CD-ROM. The discs are written by a powerful la-
ser heating a spot on the disc surface; the spot is then
polarized by an electromagnet from the other side of
the disc. When read, the change in polarity changes the
reflection of the (weaker) reading laser at that spot, and
difference is interpreted as a data times, much like a
magnetic hard disk, and are more durable and cheaper
(per byte of storage capacity) than their magnetic cous-
