Why Does Explorer Assign Imcorrect File Extensions For Wave Files

Estuardo wrote on 8/25/2002, 10:13 AM

I am using Windows 2000 Professional and I just noticed that whenever opening Explorer and looking at a CD-R in both my CD-ROM and CD-RW that any wave file is incorrectly displayed as a .cda file instead of .wav. It incorrectly shows a creation date of 01 Jan 95 and EACH track shows a time of around 0500 and a 1KB size. The CD could be 650MB large, but it will show only 1KB for each track! It does this to all my audio CD's, pressed (commercial) or CD-R. All the CD's play, display and behave properly in every respect in all audio programs I have (Feurio!, Sound Forge, CD Architect, etc.). I just can't get the proper file extension to be displayed in Explorer.

Wave files are properly given the .wav extension on all my hard drives. It's only when looking at a CD-R.

I don't know how long this has been happening as I recently unchecked "hide file extensions for known file types" in explorer. I remember that it used to properly assign .wav file extensions.

Looking at these drives through a DOS window incorrectly shows .cda file extensions.

Any ideas why I'm not correctly seeing .wav for wave files?

Any ideas?

//Stu

Comments

Estuardo wrote on 8/25/2002, 11:08 AM

I figured it out (with egg on my face).

Doing a simple google search resulted in finding a site http://www.unrelatedinventions.com/Audiotools/Help/anatomyofacd.htm that stated it is normal to get .cda (Compact Disk Audio) file extensions on CD's. Dumb me, trying to drag and drop in Explorer and wondering why I only copied the <1K file (that's what "ripping" is for...).

Here's the answer:

The specification for how audio is stored on an audio CD is known as red book format. This is not the same as the PC's filing format, so you can't just read music from an audio CD using Windows (CD-Roms have a format which Windows can understand but audio players can't). It should be noted that when you look at a CD with most versions of Windows Explorer you will see what appears to be a series of files with the extension .CDA. These are not actually files, but Windows representing the CD header information as files. You will also notice that each "file" is only a few bytes in length (usually rounded off to 1Kb in the display) – if you copy a .CDA "file" from the CD you will find that it contains no audio at all! This is why Audiotools doesn't support .CDA files. The process of copying audio from a CD digitally is known as ripping and requires special software. Audiotools has gained this feature as of v3.50.

As an aside, I my Plextor 24/10/40 CD-RW now works beautifully in CDA, but only after upgrading the firmware to v1.04. I had v1.02 before and it wouldn't work. Now I can burn a full (74 minutes) CD-R in about three (!) minutes. The only anomoly is that it says there's 74 minutes remaining when burning, but the progress bar is correct. Wahoo whooo!

//Stu

inspector wrote on 8/28/2002, 9:19 AM

In the properties of your plextor drive you can enable AudioFS. This will allow you to view the files on the cd and .wav files. You can then drag and drop and the track will be extracted to a .wav file. You may need to have the PlexManager software installed.

Steve

SonyDennis wrote on 8/29/2002, 2:37 PM

Also, some software (such as ACID and Vegas) recognize the .cda files and extract the tracks using digital audio extraction to a WAV file for use in the application.
///d@