Usually the playback starts from the storages. Before you can play the music, you must get the music and audio tracks from somewhere.

1 Audio CD

There are two kinds of Audio CD:s, singles and full length CD's. 

Then there are also two sizes of CD discs. Full sized discs and half sized discs. Half sized Mini CD's has been used in video cameras and also then when raw CD's were / are far more expensive than raw Mini CD's.

The third type for the CD discs the way you can use the discs. R discs can be used only once, RW discs can be burned with CD burner few times. Audio CD's you buy from shops are CD-R discs, usually full sized CD's.

Full length CD has room for little over 1 hour or 60 minutes of sounds and voices. Audio CD format is digital format, 44 100 Hz, 16 bit. Audio CD's have headers, almost similar to the wave headers from which the Audio CD's are complied. Each track on / in the CD has it's own CDA header file.

When CD's came they were advertised as eternal discs. And their sound quality was said to be equal to vinyls. Neither of these claims were true. When CD gets old / played enough, you cannot play the disc at all. First you have to clean the discs, and after that you need brand new CD players / drives, finally you cannot load the disc to anywhere and into anything.

Getting confused

The disc on the which the audio cd is pressed or burned is called CD-R, Audio CD format is a picture which is burned onto disc. CD-R is the optical disc type which has standardized picture for the Audio CD's. In theory you cannot burn Audio CD's on DVD and BRD discs. If you do so, part of the CD players and drives will not recognize the disc as Audio CD. 

MP-3 play lists and other file lists operate with so called auto-run feature. When there is auto run file in the root of the optical disc, the format of the underlying disc is not important. Computers common file I/O routines makes the required readings and internal conversions.

2  Downloaded files

The downloading business is popular business. Apple, the phone and computer maker is also the  leading download reseller of the music. Apple makes over 20 % from it's revenues from music sales.

The downloadable files are usually MP3 or MP4 files. Their size is around 25 % from the size of wave files. MP compression is not loss less, MP and other downloadable files reminds the old C-Cassettes. Typical for the both is, that part of the high frequency tones and sounds are missing from the playbacks. Same thing goes with most sophisticated musical  maneuvers.

From iTunes you get MP4 files with 256 kBits / second compression, the Audio CD is 172 kBytes / second, in same format iTunes quality stinks with only 32 kBytes / second. 

The biggest difference between MP3 and MP4 is the way the packing format is used. MP-3 is made for sounds only, and MP-4 is general use multimedia packing format. The quality of the MP3 packing is very heavily dependent on the encoder, which is used to pack the audio data. Boys elder music is packed with tight 96 kBit/s quality, the files are packed the high quality HW based encoder. The difference to the common use encoders can be heard clearly.

According to the white papers the developers have written about MP4, MP4 is packing format for internet. In practice it should mean that packing ratios and small sizes are more important than the sound quality. Boys music, you can listen on this site, is an example from intended internet use of the MP-4 packing.

If you or your parents have an audio system at home, you should never buy music as downloadable files. The better audio systems tend to emphasize the poor quality of the downloaded files.

Besides the quality issues, it is very easy to lose the downloaded file from your hard disk or playback device. Hard disk errors which would damage the files are very rare. But when your computer or playing device crashes during the play, in the worst possible scenario you lose all sound files, from the directory you used as storage for your sound files.  Windows for example is very famous from it's fully automated hard disc cleaner. When your computer crashes, during the next boot your disks are sometimes checked for corrupted files. Unfortunately the checker program stinks. Besides the corrupted files, it deletes also non-corrupted, and recoverable files from your disks. 

So. After the purchase, you should always make up a back-up copy from the song you bought.

3. Vinyl and Stone records

When talking about sound quality and the vibes you can get from the music, old vinyl records are still the best. They store the music as analogical curves. If the master tapes from which the vinyl is made are digital, the sound quality suffers from that.

The vinyl records have three sizes. LP ( = long play ) is the album sized record, it has room for 30 to 40 minutes. EP ( = extended play ) is mid sized vinyl.  On EP's there are usually 4 to 6 songs. Singles are the smallest vinyl records. They have one song on each side, two in total. 

All vinyl singles and EP's must be played with 45 rpm speed and LP's with 33.3 rpm.

Stone records had two sizes. Singles and EP's. Stone records were played faster than vinyl records, they were played with a speed of 78 rounds per minute. The stone records were used in first record players and also in historic gramophones. Vinyl records and record players came to markets in the mid 50's.

The vinyl records gets old quite quickly. Scratches on the records are very common. Scratches and smaller signs can be heard during the playback.

4. Tapes

There has been two major types of tape recorders. And also two types of tapes. Reel-Tapes and C-cassettes.

The magnetic ribbon in basic tapes was plastic tape, which had small iron particles attached into it. In the late 70's tapes which used chrome oxide instead of ferro oxide came to markets.  Quite soon after that, the tapes with special metal compound came to markets. Chrome and metal ribbons were used in C-Cassettes.

Tape reels were very flexible. All tapes could be used with all three speeds. Then there was awful many lengths. In common use there was two types of recorders. The cheaper recorders played 13 and 15 cm reels with fixed 9.5 cm/s speed.  With an expensive HiFi-Stereo recorder you could play all available tapes, reels and  tape lengths.

C-Cassettes have also quite a many styles. The basic tape is 60 minutes long Ferro-Oxide tape. 90 minute long C-Cassettes were also quite popular. Then there is the special compounds too. C-Cassettes came to markets in the early 70's, they overthrew the tape recorders and tapes very quickly. Cassettes suit very well for car audio, and got lots of boost from that.

The computers of 60's and 70's had also built-in tape recorder-players in them.

Right after the magnetic tape is recorded it starts to lose the magnetization. First the tape loses the high frequencies, then the lack of magnetization starts spread to all frequencies. C-Cassettes got very easily stuck into the player. The transport mechanism pushed the tape inside the player. If you got the cassette out of the player, without destroying the cassette, the stuck left signs to the tapes. You could hear them during the playback. The reels got also stuck in to the players, but not as often as C-cassettes.

When CD gets stuck in the middle of song, you usually find your finger prints from the disc. Exactly at the same location the CD got stuck. Another possible reason is that there are scratches on the disc.

CD discs are read from inner circle to outer circle. The order is reversed from the vinyls and tapes.

Vinyl and stone record

Vinyl discs were quite big improvement to the records. They are made from plastic and they are far more durable than old stone records.   The durability made it possible to increase the size of the disc. So that you can put around 15 minutes ( six songs ) on each side of the record.

Sound tracks on the vinyl records are in the open air, not under glittering, transparent cover. There fore records should be cleaned from dust, before putting and playing them with the record player. There are ready made cleaning systems for the job. The packs have the booze and brushes with what you can do the job. Without making new scratches and more damages to the record.

Records and CD's can be washed with water too. With hand warm water and mild soap.

Cassettes and tapes

Cassettes, the boxed tapes, were  handy and carefree. All you have to do is to keep the tape far from speakers, direct sunlight. and major magnetic radiators. Cassettes last as long as they last.

The rules for keeping the tapes in good condition, are equal to the cassettes.

The heads of the tape and cassette players should be cleaned on regular basis. After 10 to 50 hour usage. The cleaning of the magnetic heads should be done as handwork. With spirit and very soft fabric. The cleaning tapes do not work and clean the heads well.

All tape recorders have a separate, easy to open cover, over the heads. For cleaning purposes.