...are three reasons to go ahead and rip lossless/FLAC files on your Mac. Transport quality: one of the audiophile arguments for Squeezeboxes and Transporter is that modern hard drives can deliver much higher data throughput than is needed even for uncompressed Red Book CD audio files. Hard drives are designed to deliver bit-perfect copies of data embedded on their platters, while CDs are designed to be somewhat fault-tolerant. You're more likely to get bit-perfect data from a computer hard disk than a CD transport.
Disc errors: good audio-ripping software like 'cdparanoia' will force your computer to retry sections of the CD that give read errors. I've got one pop/rock CD from a friend whose surface is so damaged it won't play in any audio CD player I own (or any regular CD-playing computer software) -- not a single track. It took many hours for cdparanoia to rip the disc (vs. minutes for a good clean CD), but the resulting audio files are excellent. If you're using *any* CD transport that's playing "real time" and its buffer (see above) fills, that transport will try to drop/skip read errors. You'll get music based on imperfect data -- flawed sound. Playing songs again: I'd suggest looking into tools like "tmpwatch" (I don't know if that's readily available for Mac OS X) that delete files that have not been used in some number of days/hours. Go ahead and rip lossless files to a special directory that you prune periodically (daily?). If you like a CD and keep listening to it, its files will remain on the disk. If not, let your pruning script remove them to free up space. -- peterw http://www.tux.org/~peterw/ free plugins: http://www.tux.org/~peterw/#slim BlankSaver BottleRocket FuzzyTime SaverSwitcher SleepFade StatusFirst VolumeLock ------------------------------------------------------------------------ peterw's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2107 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=33633 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
