About this page
Every part is generated in code from dimensions and profiles: no model files. The disc follows the CD standard; the pickup and its frame follow a common real mechanism, the kind with a tilted plate for a beam splitter. Module notes carry their sources at the foot.
What you hear is real. Glass Arcade is resampled and requantised as you choose, and the pits in the Disc picture are made from those same numbers: packed into bytes, each byte coded to fourteen channel bits under the CD’s rules (every pit and land 3 to 11 bits long), and a pit edge is a 1. The code table is this page’s own, built to those rules. A real disc also carries check bytes for error correction and timing data, which are not drawn.
Some things are drawn larger or slower so they can be seen: the disc is drawn turning at a tenth of its speed (the readout gives the real one); the lens’s focus and tracking movements are about three times larger; the magnified pits are twice as deep and pass the spot about half a million times slower; and the eight bars carry the pickup across the whole disc, which on a real one takes the whole album. The laser is infrared and invisible: it is drawn in colour.