[X4U] importing audio CD as AIFF

[Michael Winter]

On Apr 28, 2005, at 12:16 AM, Alex wrote:

>> or is there any kind of process that happens going from an Audio CD 
>> to AIFF where it would experience any degradation  ?
>
> Theoretically, no. In practice, it depends. Copying audio from an 
> audio CD is not a "simple" matter of just copying bits from one medium 
> to another. There may appear defects, ranging from small ones, which 
> most people don't notice, to very audible clicks caused by 
> imperfections on the disc surface.

I've never quite been convinced of this. Where I have the problem is 
that data CD's work day-in and day-out making perfect copies of the 
bits, but for an audio CD this somehow stops working?

I understand that when played in a "normal" CD player, things go along 
in real time and the player just does the best it can reading the disk. 
If there are errors, it does some basic correction, but mostly just 
guesses or skips the bit. CD-ROM drives in computers aren't very good 
at that -which I thought was what some of the CD anti-copy schemes rely 
on.

If you want an "exact" copy, can't you  just put the CD in, grab the 
aiff files that show up in the Finder and drag them over. AFAIK, as 
with any Finder copy, if even one bit can't be read, you'll get an 
error.

I'm still struggling with why that wouldn't work in practice.

-Mike