Shaped CD

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An audio CD in the shape of a heart.

Green Day's Brain Stew single, shaped as a brain.

A shaped CD is a non-circular compact disc. Examples include CDs in the shape of a business card, a hockey rink, a star, a map of a country, and more. These disks are usually made for marketing purposes and are properly read by most CD-ROM drives (and audio CD players, although custom-shaped CDs tend to contain data). There are many companies that sell CDs with custom shapes.

Unlike Mini CDs, which are smaller, but still circular versions of normal CDs, custom CDs can be any number of shapes, even more complicated shapes like gears with dozens of teeth, but are generally smooth and with rounded edges, such as ovals, rounded rectangles. A logo can be printed on a shaped CD, in the same way common audio CDs and CD-ROMs are labeled.

Data can only be recorded on sections of a Shaped CD that form uninterrupted circular tracks. Other parts of the shape are purely decorative - but are still often finished to the same appearance as a CD so appear silver and reflective and to be part of the data side of the CD even though they contain no actual valid bytes and cannot be read.

1 History
2 Compatibility
3 Asymmetric discs
4 See also
5 References

[edit] History

The Flaming Lips released a CD single entitled "This Here Giraffe" on the world's first ever star-shaped CD. It was in the shape of an 8-pointed star.^[1]

One shape of business-card CD. Also called a "hockey-rink" CD.

[edit] Compatibility

Shaped CDs are not compatible with all CD players — they will work with most machines in which the disc is inserted by manually clipping it onto a central spindle (the mechanism used in virtually all portable CD players), but may not work in drives which load the disc from a tray, or those which pull the disc into a slot. They can even get stuck in these players.

[edit] Asymmetric discs

Irregularly shaped, non-rotationally symmetric discs with an offset center of mass may also cause damaging vibration if played in computer CD drives, which can operate at a much higher rotational velocity than stand-alone audio CD players. Some irregularly shaped discs will work with tray loading CD drives if they include a circular ridge on their underside which centers them on the part of the tray designed to hold 80 mm CDs, if the tray has such a feature.