My Sony Dream Machine plays music CDs, but not audio books. Is there a difference?

Mar 16, 2018
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My Sony Dream Machine plays music CDs, but not audio books. My other players play both. Do you know why the dream machine won't play the audio books?
 
Solution
Music CDs are .wav files which are not compressed. In order to fit more onto a disc, audiobooks tend to be encoded in .mp3, .wma or .aac compressed formats, and it requires processing power to uncompress them on the fly.

CDs came out in 1982, at which time not even the fastest PCs had enough CPU power to play .mp3 files in real-time, so it's pretty unreasonable to expect an old CD player to just include fast enough hardware to be able to play them. And many later players could play one of the compressed formats but not the others (or variants like variable bitrate .mp3), so it also depends how the audiobook was encoded.

BFG-9000

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Sep 17, 2016
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Music CDs are .wav files which are not compressed. In order to fit more onto a disc, audiobooks tend to be encoded in .mp3, .wma or .aac compressed formats, and it requires processing power to uncompress them on the fly.

CDs came out in 1982, at which time not even the fastest PCs had enough CPU power to play .mp3 files in real-time, so it's pretty unreasonable to expect an old CD player to just include fast enough hardware to be able to play them. And many later players could play one of the compressed formats but not the others (or variants like variable bitrate .mp3), so it also depends how the audiobook was encoded.
 
Solution