Extracting audio from CD’s.

The mysteries of audio CD’s in CD-ROM drives: When you extract red book audio from a CD to a format such as .wav (Wave File) or .aif by dragging a CD track onto the Peak icon (for instance) or using Adaptec Toast’s Audio Extractor, is there any resultant quality loss, or is it just like copying a file from CD-ROM? I’m asking because sometimes I want to archive audio files to CD-R, but I’d also like to be able to listen to them in a CD player. If there’s no quality loss in CD-audio extraction, I might as well “archive” the files to an audio disc. If there were quality loss, however, I’d choose to write a CD-ROM with the non-red book files. There is no quality loss in archiving files this way. The data is the data. There can be difficulties reading them as raw data, but as long as you have the software to extract them from audio files again you should be fine. The topic of error correction often comes up at this point because it can “modify” the data as the disc is read, but again that is only going to be relevant when you are “playing” the sound files. The integrity of the data is always as good as the media and the recorder/burner/player you use.

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