Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
its not.



they are superior when it comes to bit rate/compression/size



if they wanted to MP3s could easily be copy-protected. its just another layer in the format that they could add.

Um....do you want to give us any more info aside from "it's not"? Check any internet audio forum, including Hydrogen Audio. When it comes to encoding MP3s, everyone chooses LAME.
 
I don't like to use AAC is because with iTunes, it gets DRMed,

That is simply NOT true, unless you buy music from the iTunes Store, but then you aren't ripping the songs. The only problem with AAC is that Creative etc. don't support AAC on their MP3 players, though the Zune does.
 
That is simply NOT true, unless you buy music from the iTunes Store, but then you aren't ripping the songs. The only problem with AAC is that Creative etc. don't support AAC on their MP3 players, though the Zune does.

Out of the Box AAC support will be on the rise as MPEG 4 and its variants take over the world. Just like MP3 was part of the earlier MPEG-1 standards, AAC is part of the most recent standards.

B
 
What's the point of talking about the quality differences in mp3s when you could be ripping AACs? You can just up the bitrate higher for the same file size you'd get with an mp3.
 
Um....do you want to give us any more info aside from "it's not"? Check any internet audio forum, including Hydrogen Audio. When it comes to encoding MP3s, everyone chooses LAME.

for encoding MP3s yes, LAME is the best, but that doesn't mean other codecs aren't superior when it comes to bit rate/size/quality ratios. AAC is superior in that.
 
I used to use exact audio copy with LAME to rip my CDs to MP3s with Windows, since I made the switch to my MBP, I'm just looking for a replacement to this. Exact Audio Copy was unique in that it made perfect rips with no error or jitter, anyone have any recommendations?

BTW, I've run Exact Audio Copy in Parallels and it works beautifully, I was just looking for an OS X native application.

I think some little company in Cupertino wrote an application to do exactly that. Can't remember the name of the company... It was some fruitt name, maybe Apple? And what was the name of the software... something with an e? or an i? iMusic? No, it was iTunes. Yes, iTunes is the name. Use that.
 
It's good, the difference is that LAME encodes to MP3 (Mpeg Layer 3), AAC is MPEG layer 4. AAC yields a smaller file size for similar quality, however, another reason I don't like to use AAC is because with iTunes, it gets DRMed, and its hard to send your friends a song or two or move them from one computer to another.

Oh my god, not again. Could you please post here where you got this bit of wisdom from, so that we can all jump straight in their faces to make them stop making such idiotic claims?

No music that you rip from CDs into iTunes, no matter what format, will ever have any form of copy protection on it.
 
for encoding MP3s yes, LAME is the best, but that doesn't mean other codecs aren't superior when it comes to bit rate/size/quality ratios. AAC is superior in that.

If you read closely, that's what I said before. For encoding MP3's, not encoding audio or codecs in general, I was only concerned with MP3s.
 
I think some little company in Cupertino wrote an application to do exactly that. Can't remember the name of the company... It was some fruitt name, maybe Apple? And what was the name of the software... something with an e? or an i? iMusic? No, it was iTunes. Yes, iTunes is the name. Use that.

Um....did you read the rest of the thread? If you did, you'd realize that this reply isn't as clever as you think it is, as audiophiles generally don't like iTunes as a ripper and encoder. Oh, and I believe it was mentioned several times now that I didn't want to use iTunes because I wanted something along the lines of CD Paranoia. iTunes doesn't even come close to exact audio copy.
 
I have been told that CDParanoia works well but if the drive it is being used with has cache, it will have problems finding errors. (Sadly, most drives today do have cache.)

I would also be suspect of running EAC in emulation. Since access to the optical drive is abstracted through a virtual machine and is not raw access, it might not get enough information from the drive to notice problems.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.