[X4U] importing audio CD as AIFF

[Kirk McElhearn]

On Apr 30, 2005, at 3:36 PM, DZ-Jay wrote:

>> Personally ... I would bet that many pro musicians and engineers  
>> would
>> highly doubt that it is able to be decompressed to its 'original'
>> bit-stream.
>>
>
> I agree.  Some applications, as I understand it (and I'm not sure  
> if iTunes falls into this category), do not actually receive the  
> original bit-stream as read from the disc raw, which is the problem  
> we talked about when trying to duplicate an audio disc, but re- 
> sample the audio signal that was decoded by the sound card.  So the  
> disc is actually read and decoded, then re-digitized back to create  
> the audio file.  Not much is lost during this process, nothing that  
> is perceivable at least, but it is not a bit-by-bit reproduction.

Yes it is. Take an AIFF/WAV file, then compress it in a lossless  
format, then decompress it. Use the command line tool diff; other  
than possible header info (which would include the encoding/decoding  
software perhaps), you'll find no difference.

Software does not resample the music; if it did, it would be playing  
the music then digitizing a sound stream. It simply reads the bits  
and bytes the music "file" contains.


Kirk

             Author of: How to Do Everything with Mac OS X Panther
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