Sound Quality: Copying vs Ripping CDs?

Audio Gear Talk
1

Hello all. I dug through the archives here but didn’t find a post addressing this simple question: is there any sonic difference/quality difference between simply copying the AIFF files from a CD to the Roon Core, and ripping the CDs? I am on a Mac and my thoughts are that ripping them is an unnecessary step. Why not just drag the files over to my hard drive/Core, and then just simply edit those AIFF files’ metadata?

Thanks,

2

When you copy AIFF from CD to the Mac, you are basically ripping the CD to AIFF. Using a dedicated ripping software gives you the option to specify what format to rip to (e.g. WAV or FLAC) and also the ability to detect the CD and populate metadata automatically.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the reply. I noticed that even when I didn’t edit the metadata, Roon is able to recognize the tracks and populates the related fields. It doesn’t, however, seem to actually write that metadata on to them tracks themselves.

4

By design. Metadata is held in the Roon database. Roon will only write metadata to files if they are Exported to another location.