Storing Cd's on Hard Disk

I think there is the temptation to think that software is all that is important and that any computer's hard drive will survive. In my experience, this is far from the truth. I own four Macs yet I use one as a remote desktop to control my Exemplar Music server with a Windows XP operating system. I use ExactCopy despite its dumb control system. Similarly I use Foobar to play back the music on the hard disc drive. I have copied cds on Macs in Applelossless and FLAC and used the same dacs as with the server for playback. The music server is far superior with greater resolution and detail.

I would love to have something the equivalent to ExactCopy with an Apple operating system, but not a Mac. I don't want it doing anything other than play music. Frankly, I would much prefer to listen to music on an fm station than anything off my computer. You can imagine what I think of MP-3 or putting vinyl on cds.

I have to take issue with one of Ckrody's comments above. AIFF handles metadata tags quite nicely. WAV does not.

And while lossless formats, such as Apple Lossless, return bit-perfect files, there is a growing number of people who believe the conversion back to uncompressed data streams can cause some sonic degradation, depending on how your computer audio system is set up, the speed of your processor, and so forth. I haven't been able to confirm this myself, but I decided to rip my CDs in AIFF just to be safe. In any case, converting from Lossless to AIFF is something you can do very easily from within iTunes.

I remain unconvinced that EAC offers any meaningful benefits over iTunes for ripping. Some people think it does, but it's hard to see how. Error correction in iTunes works sufficiently well that it's really the least of your worries when it comes to the sound quality of a computer audio system. How you get it out of the computer and how that process eventually talks to the DAC is where the action is.

you must mean converting from AIFF to Lossless...

There's actually menu item in iTunes to convert a song to AIFF. Under the Advanced menu, it gives you choices to "Create iPod or iPhone version", "Create Apple TV version" and "Create AIFF version". But I haven't looked into these functions so perhaps they are not what they seem.

I don't wish to muddy the waters, but I have multiple instances where two errorless WAVs of the same cd sound quite different. In one instance it is a cd with and without AVM spray painted label. The others use a Millennium CD disc used on the cd during ripping.

This makes no sense to me but it is worth it to me. I have reripped nearly all discs on my hard drives.

I misspoke earlier. The Apple files were both lossless and AIFF not FLAC.