CD-R CD-R CD-R (Compact Disc-Recordable) is a digital optical disc storage format. A CD-R disc is a compact disc that can be written once and read arbitrarily many times. CD-R discs (CD-Rs) are readable by most plain CD readers, i.e., CD readers manufactured prior to the introduction of CD-R. This is an advantage over CD-RW, which can be re-written but cannot be played on many plain CD readers. Originally named CD Write-Once (WO), the CD-R specification was first published in 1988 by Philips and Sony in the 'Orange Book'. The Orange Book consists of several parts, furnishing details of the CD-WO,
CD-R the cost of typical recorders was down to $10,000–12,000, and in September 1995, Hewlett-Packard introduced its model 4020i manufactured by Philips, which, at $995, was the first recorder to cost less than $1000. The dye materials developed by Taiyo Yuden made it possible for CD-R discs to be compatible with Audio CD and CD-ROM discs. Initially, in the United States, there was a market separation between "music" CD-Rs and "data" CD-Rs, the former being several times more expensive than the latter due to industry copyright arrangements with the RIAA. Physically, there is no difference between the discs save for the