Download and "ripping" questions with a Mac.

Sammie, thats the problem, I didn`t have it in cdparanoia checked, I`ll try it later today and see how it works thanks Greg

There has been a great deal of verbage spilled over this topic in the past and no consensus ever seems to be reached as to whether AIFF, WAV, & Lossless are sonically equivalent. I think there is a difference, depending on whether you are using a hard drive source or a cd source. Plus, I think different players/dacs must sound different with each codec as well. I can state with absolute certainty that AIFF and Lossless sound inferior to WAV through my Marantz Sa11S1 and they sounded inferior through my Assemblage 2.7 dac & various transports as well. I burned any number of excellent sounding discs with internal & external burners & high quality Mitsui & Taiyo Yuden media. In every case, I found AIFF & Lossless to sound less resolved and duller.

Another ripping program for the Mac is XLD. Here is a link that will help you find a download:
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=XLD

In my limited experience XLD does a better job than does Max in exporting to iTunes and in importing artist, album, track metadata. I have not yet had the time to test differences between the two programs, or the different file formats, because my DAC is being updated.

If you use Max here is a link to a script that can be used to import data for tags:
http://forums.sbooth.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1930

Photon46 -- can you clarify your comment "depending on whether you are using a hard drive source or a cd source?" Did AIFF and ALAC sound inferior to WAV off the hard disk and also when you burned CDs from those files?

Drubin, in the many discussions about this I've read, it seems that many positive comments about AIFF or Lossless are made by those who have moved on to music servers or hard drive based systems. Negative reactions to those codecs are made more often by those still spinning silver discs. I've not listened to enough highly resolved hard drive based systems to have an opinion about the use of Lossless or AIFF in that context. I'm still one of the Luddites still using physical media in a cd player as my primary music source. My perceptions about the superiority of WAV is solely in the context of my system. Obviously, there are a lot of people with excellent systems who don't hear things the way I do. Why? I don't know. Again, commentary in various forums just seems to imply that those with hard drive sources are happier with codecs other than WAV.