[X4U] importing audio CD as AIFF

[Michael Winter]

On Apr 28, 2005, at 12:08 PM, DZ-Jay wrote:

> Michael Winter wrote:
>> I'm still struggling with why that wouldn't work in practice.
>
> Mainly because you are thinking of an audio cd in terms of a list of 
> files, like reading a floppy disk, or a hard-disk, or any other media 
> with a file-system.

I understand that. I think of it this way:

All the audio on the CD is represented by a single string of bits.
Each "song" is represented by a contiguous section of that string of 
bits.
To get an "exact" copy of a song, you need only get an exact copy of 
that section, put those bits in a wrapper, and call them an AIFF.
Do that for all the songs.
Then use a program like iTunes to take all those songs out of their 
wrappers, put some silence in between, splice it all together and write 
one long string of bits back to a recordable CD.

I call that an exact copy, because the music is exactly the same. It 
sounds like others would say its not, because the spaces iTunes inserts 
between the songs is not identical to what was on the CD

So the big question in my mind is, can the computer make an exact copy 
of a given segment of that single string of bits. IMO it can. Others 
disagree. I could easily be wrong, I'm just looking for a convincing 
argument.

-Mike