Can someone please explain the difference between both to me? Can the HD read both the same way...Picking up car in a few weeks and I'm trying to locate answer to this...I'm sure someone has music on their HD from both sources...

Thanks!

 

What are you actually asking? How track title works or quality or what?

If you're asking about the gracenote CDDB stuff, it's going to depend on the CD and the specific tracks purchased from itunes.
The gracenote recognition uses the CD table of contents to determine the CD title and tracks. The table of contents is basically the location of each track on disc, this is more or less based on the length of each track. There's some fuzziness allowed in case of mp3/aacs burned to CD, alot of mp3s and AACs are slightly off in time from the original CD tracks, so whether or not the gracenote database will get a match on an itunes burned CD depends.

Obviously, if you're not burning a whole album and making a mixed CD there's no way it'll be able to get track titles automatically.

If you're talking about quality, there's potentially a big difference. AAC (itunes store format) is 128kbit/s bit rate. Transcoding to PCM digital data (CD format) from a lossy format is going to result in quality loss. Re-ripping to lossy mp3 on the harddrive is not usually ideal.

Not everyone can tell the difference though, so just give it a try.

 

I'm really talking about Track recognition...I have a lot of music that I have in MP3 format (not Itunes purchased)...If I burn them to CD will the HD recognize them

 

Yes, the system can recognise them if you burn them with CD text but I read somewhere else on here that it will not read the CD text from itunes so use a different program like Nero to burn.

 

Absolutely. Make sure the "CD Text" option is turned on, believe in Itunes it is under the Burning menu somewhere in the preferences. Does not matter if it is Itunes purchased or not.