CompuServe Messages

Eric, Yes, mixed mode discs are possible, and have been done successfully for some time. Generally, you need to tell the audio player which track to read, as if you were choosing a specific song, since the tracks with the data would be unintelligible to the audio player. The CDROM player should be able to discern from the TOC where to look for data. Compression of audio can be done in a CDROM environment, but for straight "Red Book" audio it's impractical. Either you would need special decompression hardware/firmware in the audio player (which doesn't exist as far as I know) or there would have to be a computer interface to do software decompression to play back the sound. What is possible is to use a lower sampling rate (speech doesn't require the same bandwidth as music), which might save some disc space. Please ask a digital audio specialist about that, though. It's not my field and I'm just guessing. Kathy Cochrane [GO ONEOFF]