FLAC is nice because of the small footprint. AIFF and WAV are similar in size I do believe. I believe the flac footprint is also smaller than ALAC.

FLAC is also reccomended due to the widespread support.

as far as MAC media players...i believe you can use darwine to run foobar(itd be my first choice) on an intel mac or...this app is getting a lot of buzz..

http://getsongbird.com/

for ripping on mac
http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/

Hi Bohemianism,

Welcome to the forum. Please find some high level answers below. You will find that these and similar questions come up reasonably often down on the Computer Audio board so I would refer you down there for further reading.

Quote:
So I've heard many people talk about iTunes not being a good music player, and using better one.
What is it about iTunes that makes it fall short in the music playing category?
What are the other (better) music players out there (for an apple OSX 10.5 computer).

iTunes is actually more of a library management system than a music player. It just supplies some input parameters to QuickTime which decodes the actual audio. The biggest problem with iTunes/QT is that it is a completely proprietary and largely closed system so it is sometimes very difficult to know what is going on, and if you hit problems you are pretty stuffed. For instance, while the audio samples are held in individual files the metadata (track names, album art etc.) is held in a separate file in a completely proprietary format. Likewise, Apple's lossless codec ALAC is completely undocumented and third-party decoders all rely on some open source code created by someone who reverse engineered the protocol. While he did a great job there are lots of bugs, especially in the handling of hi-rez material. I had an issue where iTunes deleted a large number of my music files while 'tidying up'. The Apple support forums were no help at all so I just had to rip them all again.

Quote:
Also when ripping CD's onto the computer what is the best way of doing it? I've heard iTunes is not good here too? What is recommended for ripping? What makes them better?

The key thing is to use error correction so that in the result of a corrupt sector the drive just keeps reading until it gets the right data. This is available as a setting in iTunes although again, being a proprietary system and largely undocumented, nobody other than Apple really knows what this setting does. A program called EAC has a similar function but it is documented in considerable detail so folks have been able to independently verify that it does what it says on the tin.

Quote:
Finally, what is the difference between lossless formats. I hear some people say FLAC is the best. What makes it better if their all lossless? How does AIFF compare to FLAC? Oh and where doesn't Apple Lossless rank?

There are lots of differences between lossless formats (degree of compression, compute power, asymmetry, streaming support, etc.) but I would say the principal two for most folks are (i) breadth of hardware (and 3rd party software) support and (ii) support for metadata. Loessless is exactly that so don't believe anyone who says there are sound quality differences. This has been proven many times for all the major lossless formats (at least for 16/44/.1 source material).

If you have a Mac and/or an iPod then ALAC is your obvious choice of lossless codec, if not then FLAC is by far the most popular. AIFF is just an Apple container format, a bit like Microsoft WAV. IMHO it is only really of interest to folks who do their own recordings and who work with multichannel or hi rez PCM formats. The Apple equivalent of FLAC is ALAC which is probably more relevant to your needs.

Quote:
I know there's alot of question, but it would be a huge help if you guys could share some of you wisdom with me.

Hope this gets you started. Good luck!

The best burning app ive seen for mac

if you want to use FLAC(still my suggestion as it is widely documented and very popular..being incorporated in many hardware devices(such as squeezebox, sound devices 722, etc)

you can play the FLACs with the Songbird program i mentioned, and decode with Xact, to burn with "burn

Hi Bohemia.

For a media player, most people use either JRiver Media Jukebox, Fubar 2000 or Media Monkey. These are all free downloads and support ASIO if you are using that to bypass Windows XP KMixer.

For ripping, a lot of people use the Exact Audio Copy software (also a free download). EAC provides more options than the media players listed above, but it is not a player.

For further refernce on this subject check out the following forums (which contain links to in-depth tutorials): Hydrogenaudio, Computer Audiophile, Audio Circle, Head-Fi and Audiogon.

Hey mike19,

OP is using Mac, hence suggestions above.