[plug] CUE/BIN vs ISO

[James Devenish]

In message <200309031741.10954.derekfountain at yahoo.co.uk>
on Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 05:41:10PM +0800, Derek Fountain wrote:
> So the link you gave earlier, which I'd read before and just served to confuse 
> me,

Where's Craig when you need him ;-) Presumably, Google "has" answers to
all these questions. I think the text at the link just means that Nero
will read tracks one-by-one, or that it will treat all the byte data as
an ISO image even if there are actually audio tracks stuck on the end.

> A CUE/BIN generator actually takes audio with it, like a 'dd' would.
> 
> What puzzles me is why CUE/BIN is necessary. It sounds like a complex way of 
> doing something very simple - just copying the binary image on the media.

The BIN is probably really simple (e.g. the 'surface' of the CD, as you
mentioned, with all the raw bits like error correction codes). The CUE
file then preserves the "metadata" about the contents of the BIN file in
a convenient manner (then again...wouldn't the BIN file contain all the
data, too?). Perhaps docs in the cdrecord/cdrtools package would shed
light. Or Google! Sorry for guessing!