I was messing around with an audio CD on my Mac last night and I noticed something rather interesting (well, interesting to me, but then I am a nerd).
On Windows, if you ‘explore’ an audio CD all you see are ‘.cda’ files which can’t be read or played as such. If you try to copy/paste them to a folder on your PC, you don’t get anything which can be read or played either (least not on my XP laptop, not tried on wifey’s Win7). I can appreciate why this is, because while Red Book is definitely not my specialist, I do understand at least the rudiments of how audio CDs are created and why they need to be ‘ripped’ to get audio off them in a data-format like WAV.
On my Mac, things are completely different. Open an audio CD on a Mac and you get a window of ‘.AIFF’ files which not only can be played in-situ with QuickView but can even be copied/pasted to another folder, just as if they were files on a data CD. Once copied, these too can be played and even edited.
I was wondering why Macs can do this, and what difference there would be between ripping the audio from the CD in a conventional way and just copying/pasting directly from the CD to a folder, other than the latter method won’t create any tags.
In fact I can see an experiment coming up later. I’ll rip a track from a CD losslessly, first using iTunes then using XLD, then just via a simple copy/paste, and we’ll see what differences there are.
On Windows, if you ‘explore’ an audio CD all you see are ‘.cda’ files which can’t be read or played as such. If you try to copy/paste them to a folder on your PC, you don’t get anything which can be read or played either (least not on my XP laptop, not tried on wifey’s Win7). I can appreciate why this is, because while Red Book is definitely not my specialist, I do understand at least the rudiments of how audio CDs are created and why they need to be ‘ripped’ to get audio off them in a data-format like WAV.
On my Mac, things are completely different. Open an audio CD on a Mac and you get a window of ‘.AIFF’ files which not only can be played in-situ with QuickView but can even be copied/pasted to another folder, just as if they were files on a data CD. Once copied, these too can be played and even edited.
I was wondering why Macs can do this, and what difference there would be between ripping the audio from the CD in a conventional way and just copying/pasting directly from the CD to a folder, other than the latter method won’t create any tags.
In fact I can see an experiment coming up later. I’ll rip a track from a CD losslessly, first using iTunes then using XLD, then just via a simple copy/paste, and we’ll see what differences there are.
There's just some invisible "clever" going on that presents the contents of audio CDs as .aiff files even though they aren't really .aiff files. It wouldn't surprise me if Windows Vista/7/8 does something similar; XP is very old.
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