Play CD Audio
Right mouse-click and Audio Track and select Play Audio.
Playback is Digital (IsoBuster >= 5.6)
From IsoBuster 5.6 onward audio playback is digital. This means that IsoBuster reads the audio track data by itself and sends it to the Windows MM (Multimedia) audio playback interface for digital playback.
This has several advantages over the old analogue playback:
- No longer hardware dependent
- Also works on image files (Any type image file IsoBuster supports)
Playback is Analogue (IsoBuster <= 5.5)
From IsoBuster 5.6 onward analogue audio playback has been removed. It is old technology that is not used anymore in modern systems and it is not supported anymore by modern hardware.
Pros en cons :
Pro :
- A command is sent to the drive and the drive does all the work. No system resources are used.
- Also works via the front jack of your CD/DVD-ROM drive.
- No Digital Audio Extraction done by the system at high speed.
- Drive can play at 1x, so no spinning noises etc.
Con :
- If you want to hear the sound via the speakers the audio cable needs to be connected from the back of the drive to the audio card.
- Old technology, for instance done by Windows 95 and 98. From Windows ME onward, Audio playback is done digitally which means that Windows is actually reading the audio data and is processing and converting the data by itself. Because of this, hardware vendors mostly removed this functionality again.
Reading the Audio data (cfr >= Windows ME) is also known as DAE (Digital Audio Extraction). It is what IsoBuster does when it converts a track to a *.wav file, it is also what other programs do when they rip the audio (e.g. to convert to mp3).