Hi,
i've roamed around to try to find a way to painlessly, as in "i'm lazy and want a GUI" convert a library of cds to Apple Lossless while keeping a minimal amount of control on the quality of the rip, not that i'd hear a difference but that i'd rather save myself the pain of hearing it and then feeling an urge to re-encode the whole thing.
Going through Firestarter has yielded reasonable results, inasmuch as things seem to rip, and do so in such a way as to appease my paranoid tendencies, but there's this issue of it generating two files per CD session (some, likely purporting to be of the more entertaining, more have multimedia content, and therefore several sessions...).
One is a .bin, which Toast *could* probably mount for re-encoding, the other is a .toc, which Toast cannot read. Firestarter cannot mount the images.
The one toc to cue (which toast *could* likely read...) converter for OSX i could find is a *nix thing that i simply can't find compiled.
So, here's the pop quizz...
a) is there a way for a complete idiot to use these .bin and .toc files ?
b) has someone with better wizardry genes been kind enough to put a drag n' drop, dummy-proof front-end lamer thing that would, say, allow a cd mounted on a desktop to be paranoia-ripped into, say, a series of files in a chosen location for later encoding ?
c) have i completely missed the point of the wonderful magic built into x or y OSX software (say, itune's secure rip which doesn't appear to be the least secure to me...) that would allow me to do all that without asking arcane questions on internet fora ?