Within the uncommon case we hearken to an audio CD today, we sometimes depend on off-the-shelf {hardware} to decode the 1s and 0s into the dulcet tones of Bizarre Al Yankovic for our listening pleasure. [Lukas], nonetheless, was lately impressed to strive decoding the pits and lands of a CD into audio for himself.

[Lukas] did the good factor, and headed straight to the official Pink E book Audio CD commonplace paperwork freely out there on archive.org. That’s a heck of loads cheaper than the €345 some publishers wish to cost. Not wanting to make use of a microscope to learn the person pits and lands of the disc, [Lukas] used a DVD participant. {The electrical} indicators from the optical pickup have been captured with an oscilloscope. 4 megasamples of the output have been taken at a fee of 20 megasamples per second. This knowledge was then ported over to a PC for additional evaluation in Python.

[Lukas] steps us by means of the methodology of turning this uncooked knowledge of pits and lands into actual audio. It’s a number of work, and there are some complicated missteps due to the DVD participant’s quirks. Nonetheless, [Lukas] will get there in the long run and exhibits that he really understands how Pink E book audio actually works.

It’s at all times attention-grabbing to see older media explored on the naked degree with logic analyzers and oscilloscopes. For those who’ve been doing related investigative work, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!