.FLAC format to .CDA using Ashampoo ~ Volume Limits

[drew4u2c]

Using Ashampoo Burning Studio 6 Free edition to burn some audio cd's. Today I discovered that when I burn a CD-R in the 'create audio cd to use in normal cd players' i.e. car stereo, when I drag and drop a flac file, the software converts the .flac to .cda in the process of burning. This is all well and good because both are losless formats I gather. However, when I play the .cda format songs in my car stereo , and home boombox, there seems to be significant volume loss. Quality is fine, but I can max up the volume and have it not be rattling the car. I mean it's loud, not soft by any means. Not that I would want to listen to music at the extreme volume it is capable of playing with store bought CD's, but I do find sometimes I would want it louder than this .cda disc is producing. Even with home made mp3 cd's the volume can get louder. I've noticed this burning different albums, so I don't think it unique to the original file source.

Also, I noticed something peculiar to me; that the finished disc with the .cda files when explored in Windows My Computer, only recognizes each individual song file as 44bytes / and size on disc as 2.00KB. Why is that?

I haven't tried converting the flac's to .wav files, which may solve the problem. But I have dozens and dozens of CD-R's to burn and in my own stubborness don't have the patience to convert the flac's to wav's even if I were to delete the wav's afterwards.

Thanks for the info.

 

[cwwozniak]

Hi drew4u2c, and welcome to TSG.

An audio CD does not contain separate audio files. It has one long continuous data stream of all the tracks, one after the other. It also has a table that identifies the exact start location of each track in the stream.

The .CDA files you see when you open an audio CD in Windows do not exist on the CD. Windows creates them on the fly when you open the disc and they only contain information for a media player to locate the particular track on the disc.

Information about the Multimedia file types that Windows Media Player supports
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316992

The .cda files are representations of CD audio tracks and do not contain the actual pulse code modulation (PCM) information.

The 44 byte vs. 2.00 KB file size difference means that the actual contents of the file is 44 bytes but due to the way disc space is allocated for by Windows, the file occupies 2.00 KB of space.

As for the low volume issue, it could be a matter of the original FLAC files having a lower volume or there is a problem with the codec used by Ashampoo Burning Studio to convert a FLAC file to audio CD data. I am not familiar with the program. Does it give you any option to adjust or normalize the volume of files as it converts and burns them to disc?

 

[drew4u2c]

I don't see any option to adjust or normalize the volume of files as it converts and burns them to disc. I've been trying to find a free/trial software that may offer this option, such as Nero 9, but Nero 9 does not accept flacs, despite the codec I tried to supplement with it.

I appreciate your info provided about .CDA files etc.., I love learning something new everyday.

Oh, also am I for the most part correct that .FLAC > .CDA is losless in terms of audio quality? Thzx again

 

[cwwozniak]

Oh, also am I for the most part correct that .FLAC > .CDA is losless in terms of audio quality? Thzx again

From my limited experience, I believe that a CD -> FLAC -> CD conversion process using a high enough FLAC bit rate is totally lossless in that a bit-by-bit comparison of the before and after CD data stream is identical.

 

[yasaki]

flac can be converted to mp3 with this tool for mac.
http://www.applemacvideo.com/mac-video-converter.html#188