Transport rips to hard drive?

Transports are used to achieve real-time low-jitter. This is not required for a good rip, only a clean error-free data read. Transports with the lowest jitter may not be the best ripping drives due to error correction and offset.

However, the CDROM drives in laptops and desktops are generally inferior to the best ripping CDROM drives. There have been studies, notably by RIPNAS to determine which drives achieve the best rips and do all of the error correction properly. The findings showed that a Teac drive was the best. I use this drive with excellent results. See this for more info:

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=68223.0

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

If you have a Mac, DO NOT use AAC. AAC is compressed. Use Apple Lossless for the best quality.

I would recommend Apples non-compressed format, AIFF, if you are on a Mac. Also MAX software has vigorous error correction (discussed above) which will take longer to rip with, but is the best guarantee of bit-for-bit rips. I don't think the error correction in iTunes is as good. I've had disks that MAX takes very long to rip that iTunes seems to blast right through with error correction turned on. External drives/transports may be slower than internal, even if both drives share the same specs, depending entirely upon the interface they have to your computer. I think the software's error-correction will be more important than the drive (someone correct me if I'm wrong).

If you have a Mac, DO NOT use AAC. AAC is compressed. Use Apple Lossless for the best quality.

When I decided to rip my music, I was concerned with the PC transport in my rig. I decided to go with an outbiard Lacie firewire CD burner, which is only used for ripping. I don't use the PC's drive to rip at all. My FLAC files sound very god and I never had an error or reliability problem. Definitely worth the small investment. It seems faster than the onboard, and, while I can't say I compared the sound off the two, it is very convenient having the CD transport on your desk at your fingertips when you're in for a few hours of ripping. The firewire also doesn't drain CPU cycles.

What Bigbucks said. Use EAC and rip to either FLAC or WAV (hard drive space is cheap nowadays), or AAC if on a Mac.

Go to hydrogenaudio.com and learn more.

Use EAC (exact audio copy). You don't need any special drive.

Kijanki is correct. A computer can read the data better because it's a totally different process. Some software and drives "promise" better performance, and sometimes drives can have alignment problems, but overall, digital data is better archived and retrieved by a computer.

This is why I very confidently state that a digital music file sounds better than a CD transport. Good examples of this are the Linn DS and Naim products. Even people who have used entry level digital music systems will agree that they rival CD players costing much more.

I'm not going arguing against CDs. I still buy CDs, and if someone doesn't want to mess with a computer/network music system then they should stay with using a CD player, but the fact is, a digital music file can sound extremely good.

If computer can read data CDs it should be able to read music CDs. There are programs that read music CD as data. They force transport to read given sector many times if necessary, to obtain correct checksum.

CDP uses Cross Interleaved Reed Solomon error correction code that interpolates missing data. CDPs operate in real time and reads given sector only once.