When a CD was analog to a PC
by Mgradyc - 6/15/05 2:40 AM
In Reply to: 1100101010011 by trekker75
For those of you too young to remember, there was a time when personal computers used things like tape drives and 5 1/4'' floppy drives to store data. I remember when ''affordable'' hard drives for home computers were the new rage! (A few MB- yes that's right, Megabyte, not Gigabyte, for ''only'' a few hundred bucks!) When the CD emerged as a music format, computers did not have CD drives yet. Software came in boxes on 1.44MB floppies (that is, the ultra modern double sided- double density ones held 1.44MB). So to get a sound into your computer (assuming you had one of the cutting edge systems that could make more sounds than generic ''beeps'') it had to be inputted using an analog input. So you had to play the CD on your CD player and use the analog output from it to connect to the analog input of your computer. You then recorded it in real time to the best quality bit rate (not much by today's standards) your feeble little machine could keep up with. And compared to your total storage capacity, the files were relatively HUGE, so mostly this was used to rip small bits of songs to use as sound effects, not to record a (gasp) entire song. That would take too much of your memory.
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