07-25-2009, 02:10 PM
SKYLANE wrote:
I usually wanted my music in mp3 format, so I would burn my AAC files to Audio CD and then rip them to mp3 format. I then archived my AAC files for safe keeping. Not sure what that meant to the DRM attributes, I am guessing they didn't carry over to the mp3 files (???).
Correct. All "meta" information about that song is lost when you burn it to an old fashioned audio CD. The audio CD format only stores the sound information and does not store any identification info. Thus it has nothing to identify you, the song, or the album.
How the song and album info is determined when you rip a purchased audio CD is a special type of voodoo using an outside database and searching for records that have the same "fingerprint" of the number of songs and durations of the songs. There are many occasions where different albums have identical fingerprints. iTunes ask you to pick among the matches in these cases.