[miceblue]

So I've been ripping my music CD's via EAC on Windows 7, but I was just browsing the CD on Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) and I noticed that you can just copy the AIFF files from the CD to your hard drive.
 
What's the difference between the two? Maybe I'm just confused as to what "Accurate Ripping" actually means/is.
 
Can anyone explain what "Accurate Ripping" is and how it's different from just copying the files from the CD onto your hard drive.

 

[joeyjojo]

Why not read it on the EAC website? http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/overview/basic-technology/extraction-technology/
 
It reads every sector twice to check it got it right. It also makes a checksum and compares to a database of known checksums (AccurateRip).
 
I suspect it's more from the days of dodgy drives as these days read errors on new CDs are rather rare. I've seen it happen but only on scratched discs.

 

[bigshot]

CD format isn't AIFF, and you can't just drag a CD track to your hard drive in Mac. You rip it the same as with PC. We Mac users use iTunes with the box checked to verify rips. Same same.

 

[miceblue]

Quote:

Why not read it on the EAC website? http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/overview/basic-technology/extraction-technology/
 
It reads every sector twice to check it got it right. It also makes a checksum and compares to a database of known checksums (AccurateRip).
 
I suspect it's more from the days of dodgy drives as these days read errors on new CDs are rather rare. I've seen it happen but only on scratched discs.

Ah I see. I wasn't too sure about the benefits of accurate ripping. It makes sense to do it for scratched CD's though.
 
 
Quote:

CD format isn't AIFF, and you can't just drag a CD track to your hard drive in Mac. You rip it the same as with PC. We Mac users use iTunes with the box checked to verify rips. Same same.

The last time I had a CD in Mac OS X (2 days ago), the CD icon appears in Finder, so I clicked on that to browse the contents and all that was on the CD were a bunch of .aiff files. From that, I just copied the files onto my hard drive :S

 

[bigshot]

When i click on a CD it opens in iTunes. Perhaps your CD had a data partition too.

 

[miceblue]

Quote:

When i click on a CD it opens in iTunes. Perhaps your CD had a data partition too.

 
Oh, it might depend on the OS as well. I'm still running Snow Leopard; I should have mentioned that in the first post.

 

[wberghofer]

Quote:

Oh, it might depend on the OS as well.[…]

 
No, it does not depend on the version of Mac OS X, and it also does not matter if there are any additional data tracks on the audio CD or not. In “System Preferences” there’s an option to select the action to be triggered when an audio CD has been inserted. The default setting is to launch iTunes, but this can be changed to whatever one prefers. On my computers for example XLD automatically will be opened to rip the audio CD.
 
The Finder presents the tracks on an audio CD to appear as AIFF files, but the data there actually is stored in a different file format. However, the moment you drag and drop anything from a Finder window showing the contents of an audio CD, the files being copied will be stored in AIFF format in the target folder.
 
Werner.

 

[miceblue]

Quote:

 
No, it does not depend on the version of Mac OS X, and it also does not matter if there are any additional data tracks on the audio CD or not. In “System Preferences” there’s an option to select the action to be triggered when an audio CD has been inserted. The default setting is to launch iTunes, but this can be changed to whatever one prefers. On my computers for example XLD automatically will be opened to rip the audio CD.
 
The Finder presents the tracks on an audio CD to appear as AIFF files, but the data there actually is stored in a different file format. However, the moment you drag and drop anything from a Finder window showing the contents of an audio CD, the files being copied will be stored in AIFF format in the target folder.
 
Werner.

 
Oh interesting. I didn't know that happens, thank you for the information!

 

[bigshot]

Another example of my mac being smarter than I am!

 

[miceblue]

EDIT: Thanks moderator

 

[Destroysall]

I'm confused, isn't AIFF just Apple's alternative to WAV files. I thought both were relatively the same?

 

[bigshot]

AIFF and WAV are two pretty identical formats. Mac doesn't own either of them.