Before the invention of the CD-Recordable Drive, also known as a CD-Burner, people had one way to listen to their favorite music; go out and buy the CD. In the year 2000, the first, and probably the most influential file-sharing program today, was introduced to the world; Napster. Napster is a program which enabled multiple users to connect to each other and share MP3 formatted songs through an online server. In its first month, Napster averaged 2,500,000 users online every day, all day, sharing approximately 3,500,000 GB of files. With the creation of Napster, sales of CD burners and blank CD-Recordable disks (CD-Rs) skyrocketed for the simple reason that people would download their favorite music and copy them to a CD-R. In less then 3 years, CD-burners have captured the media-based world of technology, and have been an essential part of the average computer system today. However, the technology behind this great invention is not widely understood by the common customer. The average person simply places a black CD-recordable disc into the drive, selects the information he would like stored on it and with a simple click of a button, the information is encoded to the CD in about 10 minutes. Exactly what goes on during this process is usually a mystery, however this process also goes past just the CD-burner itself. The basics of a Compact Disc (CD) and the burning and erasing process are both essential points to the complete understanding of the CD-burner.
The basics of a CD is not a very complicated subjected. A CD is basically a disc which holds information in a digital form. However, to fully comprehend the subject of a CD-R disc or a CD-rewritable disc (CD-RW), a person must know a little more about the operations a CD goes through. The information on a disc is represented by a series of 1s and 0s. In conventional CDs, these 1s and 0s are represented by millions of tiny bumps and flat areas on the disc's reflective surface.