A question for Apple/Mac people

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So a very kind, generous friend just gifted me a Mac desktop machine she wasn't using anymore. This is new territory for me as I've always been a PC user. One of the first things I wanted to do was install EAC (Exact Audio Copy.). Turns out, EAC is for PC only. Can any of you Mac folks recommend a good program for ripping CDs? Right now all I have is iTunes, and I am sure there are more reliable programs out there.

Thanks in advance.
 
So a very kind, generous friend just gifted me a Mac desktop machine she wasn't using anymore. This is new territory for me as I've always been a PC user. One of the first things I wanted to do was install EAC (Exact Audio Copy.). Turns out, EAC is for PC only. Can any of you Mac folks recommend a good program for ripping CDs? Right now all I have is iTunes, and I am sure there are more reliable programs out there.

Thanks in advance.
DAng, I wish I had someone give me a Mac they don't use anymore...what was the gift , if I may ask?(another thing is for you to answer! ;) (y))

Another vote for XLD ...
I also got MakeMKV (beta) and DVDAudio Extractor..
and of course good ole VLC
 
Hmmmm.....good question, LOL. I don't anything about Macs and it has no markings on it. I guess it's an iMac. 21.5 inch screen, 500 GB of storage. Not sure how old it is, but the disc drive doesn't recognize blu-ray, so maybe it's not so new?
yup. what Francois said! NO BD support ..ever! BUT i am sure you can hook up an external drive which you can alternate between the Mac and PCs...
I am sure you know that you can go to the upper left corner and click on the apple and on the "About this Mac" it will tell you what it is...
ENJOY!
 
So a very kind, generous friend just gifted me a Mac desktop machine she wasn't using anymore. This is new territory for me as I've always been a PC user. One of the first things I wanted to do was install EAC (Exact Audio Copy.). Turns out, EAC is for PC only. Can any of you Mac folks recommend a good program for ripping CDs? Right now all I have is iTunes, and I am sure there are more reliable programs out there.

Thanks in advance.

What is the issue with iTunes? In my case, I rip the songs to ALACs, put them on an external hard drive, and play them through an Oppo 205. I have not noticed any differences between an ALAC and a CD when both are played through the Oppo.
 
What is the issue with iTunes? In my case, I rip the songs to ALACs, put them on an external hard drive, and play them through an Oppo 205. I have not noticed any differences between an ALAC and a CD when both are played through the Oppo.

What error detection/correction exists in iTunes is not as robust as in other software. I've spent a lot of time replacing audibly-defective iTunes tracks in a local community radio station's library.
 
There’s a checkbox in iTunes preferences to enable a better error correction when ripping CDs. I don’t know if it’s effective: I never had to use it, and I rip all my CDs with iTunes!
 
There never was an internal blu-ray drive from Apple in any Mac, before they abandoned optical drives altogether. Steve Jobs once famously said: "blu-ray is a bag of hurt"!

To know the model of your Mac, click on the  (apple) in the menu bar, and choose the first item (About this Mac).
I'm not sure what was happening with bluray initially but they just play on the Mac if you have a bluray drive.
For a while the available bluray slot loading drives would only fit in the 17" models. There's a 9mm thick (thin) model available now that you can install in the 15" models. Panasonic UJ-267. It's true that the post-Jobs models abandoned the optical drive. They also abandoned: Magsafe power port (need to charge thru a USB jack now), full compliment of ports (USB-A, firewire, Ethernet, Thunderbolt with standard display port style connection), screen shield on standard def models, logic board build quality. The post-Jobs machines aren't very Apple-like anymore.

Apple did in fact try to do battle with FLAC and push their own version of Apple Lossless (ALAC). They were stubbornly not including the FLAC codec in iTunes to push it. They didn't follow through and sell Apple lossless in the iTunes store and ended up with iTunes being this obsolete media player that didn't play standard FLAC files. iTunes is kind of like abandonware now. Any other media player is better. Even that Foobar app the Windows users like! I'm still using simpleton Songbird here myself. (No updates for a few years now. Still just works. Let's me mix surround/stereo/whatever formats in a playlist and everything always comes out the correct speakers.)

XLD is the winner for format conversions. It includes the 32:1 decimation for the virtually lossless conversion of DSD to PCM (@ 32 bit floating point, 88.2k).

ffmpeg is the most happiness and light video conversion app I've ever found! Strongly recommend this one too!

VLC is still a goto choice for most video formats as long as any included audio is strictly either 2.0 or 5.1 (and not ANY other channel format) and you don't need gapless segues between chapters. (Using the video term "chapters" here. And that's the reason VLC doesn't do gapless. It's a video player programmed to work with chapters.)

There's an AV player that will do the less popular channel formats correctly (like 4.0, 5.0, etc), will do gapless, and even does full decodes of the 'ringer' format that is dts2496. Kodi Media Center. The GUI is truly awful and will instantly turn you off! They're doing the clumsy take over the system and try to make their own "OS skin" as it were. Taking over file browsing and such. You can avoid that and turn some of the crap off but... you've been warned! It plays some of the lesser popular formats and gets it right though, so it has that going for it.
 
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The Mac can read data off a blu-ray, it can even burn BD-Rs directly from the Finder! So it is definitively supported. The bag-of-hurt I think was in regard to the licensing attached to playing movies on blu-ray. And Apple were just starting selling movies in their iTunes Store, so blu-ray may have been viewed as a competitor.

As to FLAC, I think they were afraid that it may inadvertently infringe on some patents and that they get sued if they started using it. ALAC is just as good, and Apple open sourced it, so everyone can support it.

iTunes may not be great, but it is the easiest (and only!) way to transfer music to your iPhone. It can even do compression on the fly when transferring, so you can have all your music in ALAC on your Mac, and when you copy it to your iPhone it’s automatically converted to AAC 128kbits!
 
I have 10.15 on a partition. And here I sit in 10.13.6. I'll have to check out the new thing.

Last time I tried a 5.1 file in ALAC in iTunes it still didn't recognize it. Songbird played the ALAC 5.1 like nothing was wrong. Surround unfriendly. Everything else works and ALAC=FLAC=WAV.
iTunes is in fact the file transfer utility for the iThings and this is a mountain you don't want to.. (Can I quote Billy the Mountain here?)
 
Been a Mac user for about three decades. For a few years I was converting FLAC files to ALAC because I had no good way to play FLAC. I had been using an iPod tethered to my receiver for years but it could never do FLAC and the CD player in my car could only do mp3.

Last Christmas I finally found a receiver that could handle FLAC, mp3, AAC and ALAC over USB, plus wi-fi streams in more formats than I even knew existed (Spotify Connect and TuneIn Radio were all I cared about).

Honestly, I am so sick of format issues. I just want to listen to music!
 
I have 10.15 on a partition. And here I sit in 10.13.6. I'll have to check out the new thing.

Last time I tried a 5.1 file in ALAC in iTunes it still didn't recognize it. Songbird played the ALAC 5.1 like nothing was wrong. Surround unfriendly. Everything else works and ALAC=FLAC=WAV.
iTunes is in fact the file transfer utility for the iThings and this is a mountain you don't want to.. (Can I quote Billy the Mountain here?)

If you change the extension on a 5.1 ALAC file to .mp4, iTunes (or Music) will import it and play it back in stereo. Up until tvOS 12 or earlier the AppleTV would play them back in surround. tvOS 13 broke it and they play back in stereo UNLESS you play a video with dolby digital 5.1 audio first. That flips the AppleTV in to 5.1 output mode and 5.1 ALAC files with the .mp4 extension will play in surround, until you play a video that doesn't have 5.1 which will switch it back to stereo mode. It is a bizarre and stupid bug (I've filed bug reports but it's been probably a year and they don't care). I play a dummy 5.1 video before I listen to multichannel from the AppleTV or carefully order playlists to work around it.
 
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