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Bypass downloaded audio CD info when copying CDs
Authored by: DavidRavenMoon on Apr 11, '07 06:49:32AM

The "generic" AIFF tracks you see in the Finder on a CD aren't even on the CD! This is part of the Mac's CD driver rendering the tracks as AIFF files that you can drag off the CD.

You will note that if you just insert a CD and have iTunes (or even Toast) get the track names, they can't write those names to the disk, since it's read only. The CD's track information is stored on your hard drive in a data base.

If you want an exact copy of a CD you shouldn't be using iTunes anyway. It wont give you an *exact* copy, it will import the tracks as whatever file format you have selected. You need to use something like Disk Utility or Toast to make an exact digital copy. And even then, it's only as exact as that disk is, and they always have errors (random and burst errors) which are dealt with using the Cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon coding on the disk. Pick any three CDs and they will vary slightly from one another, although we would be hard pressed to hear the difference.

That's why I tell people all the time that using these programs that do so-called "exact" CD copies, and using these check sum data bases is pretty useless, because all audio CDs have errors compared to the master they were made from.

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G4/Digital Audio/1GHz, 1 GB, Mac OS X 10.4.9 • www.david-schwab.com • www.myspace/davidschwab • www.imanicoppola.net



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