USB Flash Drive

Goldman2020

There are no moving parts within a USB flash drive (no moving disc) therefore in simple terms how does it work, store and play music?

John_Gray

Suggestion: search for something like how does a usb flash drive work

poppellerant

USB flash drives simply store the data on flash memory. You tend to find that the cheaper no-name brands wear out and slow down quicker than more expensive ones which use higher quality flash memory chips.

googler

At its most basic level, all data on the drive is stored as 1s (ones) and 0s (zeros).

A unit of storage on the drive can be switched electronically (recorded) such that when it is read off the drive, the reader notes it as either 1 or 0. On or off.

Assemble the individual units of storage into larger and larger combined units, and you have a text document, picture, or music file.

You can't listen to this directly, it's just data. In order to get the data/music onto the drive, an analogue to digital conversion is required.

In the case of a CD-resolution piece of music, the sample rate is 44.1kHz, with 16-bit words at each sample.

So, working up from each individual unit (the bit), the drive records a group of 16 units in a logical group - the word. It does this 44,100 times every second, building (16 * 44,100) 705,600 units/bits for each second of the music track. Each 16-bit word is essentially a description of what the audio is in that 1/44100th of a second.

As the track is written TO the drive, the master file record on the drive notes where they all are.

At playback, a combination of your playback software and the master file record on the drive read the written units on the drive in the correct order to be assembled and fed to electronics which convert it back into a format you can listen to. This is called digital to analogue conversion.

Does this help?

poppellerant

googler wrote: »

...

Does this help?

Goldman2020 wrote: »

There are no moving parts within a USB flash drive (no moving disc) therefore in simple terms how does it work, store and play music?

I don't think the OP was referring to optical media, but good effort nonetheless.

googler

poppellerant wrote: »

I don't think the OP was referring to optical media, but good effort nonetheless.

Neither was I.

There's a difference between a music track encoded at the same resolution as a CD (i.e. what I called a "CD-resolution piece of music"), and an actual CD.

unforeseen

poppellerant wrote: »

I don't think the OP was referring to optical media, but good effort nonetheless.

I think the comparison there was to mechanical hard drives, not optical.