Hi all. I was contemplating doing lossless "backups" of my 950+ audio CD collection, and was wondering if there was a solution for the Mac that would allow me to do the following:

1. Do a complete rip of a CD (complete with audio in gaps between tracks and "secret" audio prior to track 1)
2. Archive this in a lossless format (FLAC, Shorten, Apple Lossless, whatever)
3. Give me the ability to then do a full restore of the CD from the lossless file.

The key here is "audio in gaps between tracks" and "'secret' audio prior to track 1." Other than Firestarter FX, I haven't run across any software for the Mac that will read/write this information -- and unfortunately, Firestarter doesn't archive to lossless, only to cue/bin.

So any idea what app or combination of apps it would take to do this? Something involving cue sheets that point to FLAC files, perhaps? I was thinking Max might help, but it doesn't have burning capabilities.

Thanks!

This is difficult to do on Mac OS X. Solutions are only recently beginning to come up, but they don't address every problem.

Max is OS X's best ripper at the moment. It's secure, has support for myriad formats, and is actively developed. It's still in the early stages, so there aren't a lot of niche features, but you can request features such as ripping pre-1st track audio and audio in gaps.

For archiving, I again suggest Max. It can do pretty much any format you'd need to output.

OS X is in need of a good audio-specific burner. I just use the command-line program cdrecorder.

i strongly recommend xACT
http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/14246

its only weakness is not being able to create cue sheets. it detects gaps and creates meaningful log files, which max does not.

max is a great app for conversions though