WHAT IS MEANT BY RED BOOK AND YELLOW BOOK?
The original CD standards, set by Philips and Sony in 1980, were published in a book with a red cover. Such standards are needed so that an audio CD made by any manufacturer can be read by any CD player. They address the physical specifications for the CD; the tracks, the sector and block layout, coding and sampling of digital audio files, and other specifications. For example the recording must be a single session, limited to 99 tracks. In 1983, Yellow book standards for CD-ROM were announced as an extension of the CD audio standard. The Yellow book specifies two types of sector layout (Mode 1 and Mode 2), additional ‘layered’ error detection and correction to insure higher integrity of the contents, and much more.
