[X4U] importing audio CD as AIFF

[Alex]

On Apr 28, 2005, at 14:29, Ean Kingston wrote:

> The raw audio on a CD is 16bit 4.1khz headerless PCM file.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_CD.

You mean 44.1. And you don't mean "file". And I, for one, don't quite 
agree with the Wikipedia when it says there are "tracks". Strictly 
speaking, there's only one track on an audio CD.

> As far as there being a problem getting the exact data off an audio 
> CD, that
> is not a problem on any system that lets you at the raw device

Oh, but there is. Because of (a) the audio CD format specs, and (b) the 
raw device being the firmware in the CD drive. And thereby hangs a 
tale...

> (AFAIK only the free OSes do this)

No, but it could be more difficult on a proprietary OS, for obvious 
reasons. However, the pre-eminent proprietary OS has such a tool -- 
André Wiethoff's superb ExactAudioCopy. On the "Classic" Mac OS there 
was Astarte CD-Copy (rip <sigh>).

> I rip my audio CDs by putting them in a PC running
> FreeBSD and extracting the raw audio

You can do the same thing on Mac OS X, naturally. Look into cdrdao and 
cdparanoia.


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