Posted by news on 12/08/05 00:03

CES said the following on 07/12/2005 09:25 pm:

> All,
> I'm in the process of re-ripping all of my CD's and I have a few
> Questions before I start... I have always stayed away from AAC and WMA
> because of copy protection and their for I have encoded at 328kb in an
> MP3 format...
>
> If you encode using AAC is the file tied to the computer (ie: is copy
> protection added)? If so is their a way of getting around that??

If you rip them to .aiff that is a format used by pro apps, and is
supported by most things you would come across. It's lossless, but so is
apple lossless and windows lossless. The main thing is that with either
you may lose some compatibility.

> If you use one of the programs available to remove AAC copy protection
> do you lose sound quality?
>
> If I encode using the AAC Lossless Encoder is their a way of
> reconstituting the file back into the wav format without losing sound
> quality?

CDs use .cda format. The only easy way to keep them in this format would
be to rip the entire Cd to a .DMG in finder. So long as the format is
lossless it doesn't really matter, except that wma and aac both narrow
down the compatibility field a bit. AIFF is fine.

If you want lossless but to save some disk space (about 50%), the free
and open source flac would be a good choice,
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=13478
just convert back if you want to give them to someone else. There is a
flac plugin for iTunes, but I doubt iPods would support it.

> Does anyone know of an application that will allow you to put in a CD
> and then with one push of the button rip the CD in multiple formats
> (MP3, AAC, WMA) at the same time? By that I mean most video editing
> programs will allow you to take one source and then export it to
> multiple formats.
>
> Thanks in advance. - CES

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