>Tom's point was that there would be MORE loss then the original encoding of >the song by Apple or whomever. If you take a 320kbit data stream and put it >on a cdr uncompressed you've lost nothing. Then rip it with a lossless >encoder (flac) then again, you've lost nothing. However you do take a hit >with the file size.
You are largely right. I had assumed that the music file was going to be converted back into an MP3. That last conversion would have been where most of the quality loss occurred. However... 1) There are some mechanical errors and computational rounding in the process of converting the MP3 to a digital stream and writing the digital file onto the CD. 2) There are mechanical and computational errors in the ripping process. To avoid these you would want to buy a precision ripping program. I have seen these, but at the moment can't remember a name. It is also a lot of work to save 30 cents. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
