Best file format to rip CDs to new Mac Mini

Sorry, but this pure nonsense.

I have all my albums ripped to AIFF, since I heard differences between Flac and AIFF when I started with 'computer’audio more than 10 years ago. The mini PC I used then was underpowered to support JRIVER with Flac with the same quality as AIFF.
If I would (re-)start today, I would go with FLAC without any hesitation. (Moore’s law and all that)

But I never ever had/haveany IO wait time using AIFF, even when I played from spinning platter storage.

Dirk

I said “possibly.” IO wait can be due to anything, be it excessive fragmentation, a greedy process requesting a bunch of disk writes, or a latent mechanical problem.

Of all the systems on a PC, the slowest is a hard disk drive. It is the only device for which milliseconds of time can be a struggle.

Jitter is a time-based phenomenon. There’s no jitter induced effects from a FLAC/WAV/AIFF file not being transferred in a timely fashion other than actual skipping from a buffer emptying. That’s not jitter though.

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Wait. I’m a programmer and have been writing software since the 70s and building PCs since the eighties. I worked as an engineer at IBM. If a buffer runs out momentarily, and I mean for only a number of microseconds, you won’t hear a skip. You will hear jitter.

Of course, the buffer in Roon could be a few megabytes so the chances of it are astronomically low. But I said “possibly.” So if someone asserts they can hear a difference between FLAC and AIFF, and you don’t want to tell them they’re just plain delusional, and want to find an explanation, that is the most likely. But really, they’re probably just delusional.

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