2. pc-audio
  3. 1352421146

Rip CD to Mac - basic question

I have started to rip some of my CDs to disk using a mac. I notice a lot of people using software to do this. When I look at a CD in the finder it appears as a set of aiff files for each song, for which I have been doing a drag and drop onto my hard drive, just like copying any other file. I would rather not use iTunes.

My question is: is this a bit for bit perfect copy? If so, why use other software? If not, why not? Computer files are always bit perfect when copied. There must be some software intervention on the part of the OS anyway, as a CD doesn't contain aiff files.

Any help would be appreciated. I don't want to copy a lot of CDs like this and then find I have to do it call over again.
malcolm02
audioengr
3,282 posts
 
AIFF is unencoded, not lossless. it differs from .wav in that it has different header and instead of the words coming left-right word, they come right-left word.

ALAC and FLAC are lossless encoded.

They all suck for sound quality IME, even AIFF. I only use .wav

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
doggiehowser
672 posts
 
I think the word you are looking for is lossless compression.

I do find a slight difference between AIFF and WAV but both IMHO are better than FLAC/ALAC.

ps AIFF has the option of having big or little endian so it can be in the same order as WAV. Both WAV and AIFF are derived from the Amiga IFF standard.
erndog's avatar
erndog
261 posts
 
I've been using XLD to do my rips for the past year and rip to either aiff or wav. I do have a question about best sound. For XLD's ripper mode are people using cdparanoia III or XLD Secure ripper?

Thanks,
Ernie
More to discover