Archiving CDs

I've been using Toast on my Macintosh which has an option called "Disk Copy". You need two CD drives to use it, but it seems to work very well, and has never been blocked by copyright protection. It supposedly makes an exact duplicate of the disk it is copying, but does use the computer's RAM to do so. As far as archiving to a hard drive, I believe the better formats in iTunes are either AIFF or WAV, the latter applying to PC's as well. iTunes will let you also dictate the sampling rate at which you record the information. It has an 'auto' setting which will automatically record at the sampling rate the music was recorded at and not waste space by recording at a higher rate. I'm no expert here so will be interested to hear from others with more experience, but this is how I understand it.

Marco

If you have a Windows system, I would recommend Exact Audio Copy (EAC). Its shareware and is, to my knowledge, the only program that will do bit-for-bit copies of CDs to your hard drive. You should not lose any data that way. You can then reburn the WAV files to CD or use the WAVs for computer-based digital audio playback.