[G4] Integratng with home stereo

[Alex]

On Saturday, Jun 12, 2004, at 00:15 Canada/Eastern, zhmmy harper wrote:

> LOL

<http://dubinserver.colorado.edu/prj/jsc/p07.html>

> Windoze is better than Mac at audio?

The question is meaningless outside juvenile flame wars of the "mine is 
bigger than yours" type.

As to precision ripping or grabbing CD-DA audio, you can do it on Win, 
and you can't do it on Mac OS X. That's because there's a free app 
which does it on Win, but not on OS X. (There used to be a Mac OS 9 
app, Astarte CD-Copy, which did, although not as well as EAC, but -- 
for obvious reasons -- it doesn't work in OS X.)

There are two reasons. First, the installed base issue. Win has roughly 
80%, while Mac OS X probably around 4% or less. Which means that a 
niche application, in which, say, 5% of all users are interested, is 
perhaps a workable proposition on Win (5% of 80% is 4%) but not on OS X 
(5% of 4% is 0.2%). Second, OS X separates raw access to the hardware. 
This has major advantages, but it also makes it much more difficult to 
write an application such as EAC for OS X. On the Mac, applications 
(e.g., Finder, iTunes, Toast) use the same mechanism to access data on 
a CD-DA. Unless I'm mistaken, even cdda2wav (which is really Darwin) 
does.

For better understanding of the issue, see and compare

<http://www.escape.de/users/colossus/features.html>
<http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html>
<http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/eac3.html>

<0x0192>