Recording one CD track while listening to another - how does that work?

Factual Questions
1

OK, so as I type I am ripping my Libertines CD to my hard drive, so I can listen to it on my MP3 player. I have the option (which I am currently taking advantage of) of listening to the CD while the whole thing is burning in the background.

So at the moment I am listening to track 7 while track 12 is burning… track 13 now… how does the CD drive do this? It is playing one track at normal speed while copying a different track at 24x or so.

Does the computer instantly buffer the whole CD into memory and play from that while I am copying? Or is the CD drive somehow doing two things at once?

2

You’re not listening to the song from the CD. You’re listening to the MP3 file on your hardrive.

3

But it hasn’t ripped that yet! Or has it?

4

Duhh… I get it now. I think.

5
      • Well part of the explanation is like this: a 32X cd-drive takes about 20 seconds to completely read a 3.5-to-4 minute song…
        ~
6

A reasonably fast CDROM drive can read several blocks of one track, then read several blocks of another, go back to the first, etc., without losing a whole lot of time. Just because it is sending the bits thru the sound card in real time doesn’t mean it has to read them off the disc that slowly. We computer geeks figured out how to do smart buffering decades ago.