How Do I Rip a CD with Best results on a MacPro

Hi Stringreen - I do not do anything special, so you may get some better suggestions from others, and I look forward to some other responses. On the suggestion of a Mac using friend, I downloaded a free program called Burn, and that's all I use with my MacBook (though if iTunes doesn't see it first, this method does not work). It does however, always result in better sound in the copy than in the original, which is somewhat mysterious but true. I have never tried XLD or any other program to compare, though.

Using an outboard USB CDROM drive with C2 error correction is recommended.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Rather than use the internal CD/DVD drive that comes in the MacBook, I purchased an external LaCie peripheral drive to rip and burn music. I use Max ripper software for Mac and rip as an uncompressed AIFF file. I also use the strongest error correction setting in the software to minimize the possibility for errors in the read. In my experience, lossless files (including ALAC files) have a noticeable degradation in sound quality when burned to a disk so I don't use compression for music I want to listen to critically. Hope this helps.

Audioengr, what are examples of an outboard USB CDROM drive with C2 error correction? I own a Macbook Pro too.

Is there an inexpensive way to achieve a better quality CD copy than the original?

Foster - I use a Teac drive, but Plextor makes them too.

To get better than original results re-writing a CD to CDROM, here are the things to do:

1) use good media - Mitsui gold audio master
2) clean and treat the media prior to burn with a good treatment
3) write the disk at slow speed or use writers like the Yamaha that are optimized for this
4) get the writer modded to have a lower jitter clock in it

I don't do any of this anymore because CD players and transports are inferior to good computer playback.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio