How do WAV/AIFF files translate into Red Book CD audio?
There is absolutely nothing special about the audio data encoded on a CD. The only difference between a “raw” 44.1KHz 16-bit stereo WAV file and CD audio is the byte ordering. It isn’t necessary to convert a WAV or AIFF file to a special format to write to a CD, unless you’re using some proprietary coding (like MP3 compression) that doesn’t have a system-recognized codec. Similarly, you don’t have to do anything special to audio extracted from a CD. It’s already in a format that just about anything can understand. Just put your audio into the correct format — 44.1KHz, 16-bit, stereo, uncompressed (a/k/a PCM) — and the software you use to write CDs will do the rest. All of the fancy error correction and track indexing stuff happens at a lower level.
