Ripping to Mac OSX

Ricky, as long as you are using WAV as a file format, I don't think the ripping part will make a huge diff.

Audio card will def. make a dif.

Other comments:

1. as your music collection grows, you may quickly get beyond the typical artist, album type file structure. With a few cds this is ok, but quickly becomes unmanagable with more

2. I have a server running with 6 TB of HD space, and 6000+ CDs ripped all as WAV. As other posters have noted, storing the files as WAV, you loose the ability to track the file Meta data. The way I structured my file tree, its not too important.

since the folks who wrote the playback software were not typically into classical music, there is no search function for composer, so I structured my classical WAV files by composer first, then type, then artist, makes for much quicker searches.

For Jazz, rock and Pop, they each ahve their own main folder, with artist broken down under that.

HD space is pretty cheap these days, so why squish the file size down just to save on HD space?

3. Make sure you make a back up copy of your music files since the question to ask is not IF an HD crashes but WHEN.

best.

My system is similar to hgeitsman's - I always use AIFF with good results. The external HD is a 2 TB mirror by Cavlary connected to the Mac Pro with firewire. The iTunes music leaves the computer via a 1 foot long Toslink to a signal converter that, in turn sends the signal to the pre/pro via SPDIF digital cable. I tried USB out of the Mac but if you go to Utilities (Midi set-up) you will find that the USB "out" gives far worse specs than the "built-in Output" of the Toslink connection. The USB option gives you only one default setting of 44,100 hz 2 Ch 16 bit whereas the "built-in Output" (using the headphone jack with a Toslink adapter) gives you at least three options to choose from up to 96,000 hz 2 Ch 24 bit. For me the best sound results are at the 48,000 hz 2 Ch 24 bit choice.

iTunes and their AIFF format has been remarkably good both for importing and playback.

"Is there a sonic reason to use another program other than Itunes to rip normal redbook CDs?"

Yes. I tunes will rip CDs with errors (even with error correction option set). I use MAX set to CDParanoia algorithm with option "do not allow to skip" and found CDs that cannot be ripped while I tunes still rips them (accepts errors). Max is better IMHO than EAC that I used when I had PC.

Use AIFF or ALAC - it should not make any difference (I use ALAC). Format conversion you can do with MAX (any format to any format).