creativepart;190657 Wrote: > OK. I know that iTunes does a lossless rip and I know that it properly > tags and organizes my albums, songs and library. Is it bit perfect? > That's the question. > > It's not EAC, I know that. But I've had some not so pleasant surprises > from EAC due to it's complexity. It's easy to make a mistake. > > I think the assumption with ALAC is that it is "bit perfect", is it > not? What's the consensus on that?
There are two separate issues here. One is whether a compression program can reconstruct an compressed file that is identical to the original. ALAC and FLAC can both do this - MP3 cannot. The other is whether the software is accurately reading exactly what was on the CD, or is it interpolating or otherwise "papering over" bits that it wasn't able to read from the original CD. Some programs are better at reading the original data from the CD - EAC (for Windows) and MAX (for Mac) are two good ones. They give you lots of options about how many times to try to re-read a section if the CD drive is having trouble, and tell you when there's a problem they've had to cover up. iTunes doesn't give this level of control or information, so you don't know for sure if the file on your hard drive is bit for bit identical with the original CD. It's easy to get these two issues confused, since most software performs both functions, but they are two separate functions. -- bobschneider ------------------------------------------------------------------------ bobschneider's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10074 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=33955 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
