Is Itunes OK to rip CD's to AIFF?

One other question: Does Pure Music handle ripping, too? IOW if you have it installed and rip through iTunes is PM software doing the ripping?

If you set error correction on with iTunes how could you get anything other than a perfect rip?

The offset is screwed-up.

Try this: rip a track to .wav with dbpoweramp with Accurate-Rip enabled. Then rip the same track with itunes and compare the SQ of the two.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Steve: so they have a flat-out bug in the software? Ought to be easy to fix. How long has it existed?

I went through your experiment using Beethoven's 9th. The dbpoweramp rip sounds awesome but the iTunes rip sounds exactly like the studio version of Stairway to Heaven! Something is off indeed.

Seriously, I don't doubt the phenomena (though it is surprising). I may end up re-ripping in the near future so I'm glad I came across this. I'd always though iTunes with error correction on was golden.

Here are some good ripping drives with C2 correction:

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=68223.0

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Steve, thanks for helping out. I haven't run the test that Paulofbrecht did but I'll certainly try it too. I'm afraid I'll have the same result. Oh, boy, and I've ripped thousands of CD's in Itunes with error correction on. But my goal is still to end up with AIFF so I can share music with my kids (who use Macs), but I want to keep all the tags, track names, etc. that Itunes provides. If on a PC, I use dppoweramp and rip to WAV (is that the right format to go to?: 1) will the tracks and tags come over, and 2) can I then convert WAV to AIFF and bring those converted AIFF into Itunes, but preserving the tag, track info? Thanks again for all of us. Laurence