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supertoom · Feb 15, 2004, 10:04 AM

How good is iTunes when it comes to ripping CD's to AIFF/WAV? To Win there's an app called EAC which is supposed to have very good error correction. I haven't found any similar apps to OS X until I found X-CD-Roast (runs under X11) which have its "paranoia mode" and it works just fine. Today I found out that iTunes has its own error correction function. How good iTunes compared to X-CD-Roast and EAC?

bmedina · Feb 15, 2004, 02:47 PM

I'm not aware of any definitive tests that compare the two. The problem with iTunes is that it won't tell you if it encountered an unrecoverable error. Unfortunately, there isn't anything as good as EAC for OS X.

badtz · Feb 16, 2004, 03:11 AM

there's a new program called CDRestore 2.0 (check thread here ) .... that might do what EAC does on the Windows platform ....

<<<--- been looking for a program like EAC on OS X also!

has anyone tried CDRestore?

G-Force · Feb 16, 2004, 09:36 PM

Yes, unfortunately nothing exists that's as good and easy to use as EAC on OS X. That's why I have a cheap PC to do all of my audio extraction, encode to AAC with NERO and then I move everything over to my mac. It's not the most efficient workflow, but it's a small price to pay for having good rips.

badtz · Feb 17, 2004, 02:47 AM

Originally posted by G-Force:
Yes, unfortunately nothing exists that's as good and easy to use as EAC on OS X. That's why I have a cheap PC to do all of my audio extraction, encode to AAC with NERO and then I move everything over to my mac. It's not the most efficient workflow, but it's a small price to pay for having good rips.

have you tried CDRestore 2.0?

just curious how it fairs against EAC

G-Force · Feb 17, 2004, 07:35 PM

Originally posted by badtz:
have you tried CDRestore 2.0?

just curious how it fairs against EAC

CD restore only allows you to burn a copy of the damaged CD albeit using some form of error correction. Although you can select which songs of an audio cd to burn, you cannot extract files to the hard drive like you can with EAC so it does not provide an equivalent feature set. This program is of limited use to someone looking for an EAC equivalent on OS X.

magicbbird · Feb 18, 2004, 01:35 AM

Just wondering if I want to rip a CD, and keep the order of the songs exactly as the CD, can it be done?

I want to put some of my musical and opera CD to my Mac (maybe iPod in the future). But they will get re-organized into alph. order. I want to retain the same order as the CD (both in playlist and in regular playing). I have to manually re-order them afterwards and it is such a pain.

Thanks for your input.

G-Force · Feb 18, 2004, 08:50 AM

Originally posted by magicbbird:
Just wondering if I want to rip a CD, and keep the order of the songs exactly as the CD, can it be done?

I want to put some of my musical and opera CD to my Mac (maybe iPod in the future). But they will get re-organized into alph. order. I want to retain the same order as the CD (both in playlist and in regular playing). I have to manually re-order them afterwards and it is such a pain.

Thanks for your input.

You can keep the order of the songs if you are making a copy of the CD. But if you're hoping to put them on your HD into iTunes using CD restore won't help you at all. It is only for making CD copies not for copying individual files to the HD.

iTunes will keep the order in the playlist the same as on the CD as long as the track numbers are included in the tag info. If I sort by artist in my iTunes library, the files are sorted first by artist, then by album, and then by track number within each album so the files are in the same order as they are on the CD.

magicbbird · Feb 19, 2004, 10:37 PM

Probably I need to create separate playlist in order to keep the order of the CDs. I just choose the playlist (actually is individual CD or collection, with the correct order) if I want to listen to that.

If there are better ideas please help out. Thanks alot.

mitchell_pgh · Feb 20, 2004, 07:01 AM

Perhaps I don't have the ears, but what is the difference?

Does iTunes suck for encoding?

I've burned a ton of CDs to AAC, and haven't noticed any issues. Perhaps you are talking about somewhat damaged disks?

Help a brotha' out.

supertoom · Feb 20, 2004, 07:13 AM

when it comes to trading live concerts it's very important that the audio files are free from digital clicks, pops and skips. with error correction turned on it tries much harder to create an error free file. EAC and xcdroast creates a log so you can see exactly how the encoding went and if there are any errors.

I'ver never heard any errors on my discs when using iTunes, but it doesn't create a log, so you can never know. I guess xcdroast is the only choice on OS X (under X11). There was a commercial app called BarbaRip, but it's pretty old and I think it only runs on OS 9.