iTunes Importing?

1. Itunes natively rips CD's.. there shouldn't be any required plug ins.
2. WAV files can not be tagged with song/artist/album information... so using WMA/FLAC/Apple lossless allows this and these are smaller since they use compression (but are bit perfect)
3. WAV are raw audio files on an Audio CD..
4. Give it a listen there are plenty of threads saying they can hear a difference. I can't even in my system comparing FLAC to WAV. (I do not use Itunes)
5. If you want perfect bit for bit rips you need a PC not a MAC (unless there is a program out now)... get a Plextor drive and use Plextools or download EAC (Exact Copy) freeware and setup your CD-ROM drive to extract CD's perfectly. Then you can convert those WAV to Applelossless in Itunes I believe.

On 2/3, WAV isn't really the native file on the CD, its the native bits on the CD in a MS-DOS/Windows file wrapper. The AIFF, I believe, is the same thing in an Apple wrapper.

Ed, you're right about the WAV/AIFF thing. As I recall, AIFF was a lot more common on Unix machines, and WAV mostly on Windows. But I think that nowadays both are fairly well accepted, but WAV seems to be more universally used.

I think the formats may differ in endianness or something, but they are similar in that they are containers for the raw CD data.

Michael

Check this out

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV

FLAC, AIFF, and WMA are all Lossless formats and are recommended. Yes you can use lossless on large HD.
For 300 Cd's you will need approximately 120 GB for FLAC or WMA; and 240 GB for AIFF or WAV.
I use FLAC for its quality and because it is about half the size of AIFF. FLAC don't work with itunes. AIFF does, but I do not recommend it for ipod because of a very large file size.