I assume that's a direct file copy, not a transcode taking place?
At least by default; I seem to recall that there is (was?) a way to copy off the CD in MP3 via some preference somewhere.
AFAIK, there's neither 'file' copying (in the literal sense) nor transcoding involved in capturing raw PCM audio data on an Audio CD to an AIFF file. According to Apple,
the audio data in a standard AIFF file is uncompressed pulse-code modulation (PCM). (More specifically, the AIFF format used in Mac OS X is
AIFF-C/sowt, which only differs from the original AIFF in byte-order, but is not compressed as the C- suffix might suggest. The name refers to the (compressed) AIFF-C format from which the AIFF-C/sowt format was derived.) As
Wikipedia states: '
When audio from an audio CD is imported into iTunes or by dragging to the Mac OS X Desktop*, the resulting file is [also] an AIFF-C/sowt.'
*) In both cases the CD '
Import Settings' are determined by iTunes, and default to AIFF (Prefs, General tab). However, you can change them to AAC, Apple Lossless, MP3 or WAV. All these options, including AIFF, have 'Encoder' in their name, but in the case of AIFF and WAV this doesn't actually involve
transcoding the PCM data, but (re)packaging it from the PCM stream into PCM data chunks.
