Which audio format for importing songs for CD burning?

I am very confused about the various audio formats that you can set iTunes
to import songs from CDs. I have OS 10.4.5 and iTunes 6.0.4, and I want to
import songs from CDs like the first Weezer CD so that I can create a mix CD
of various songs from various artists to play on my Toyota Camry CD player
and my home stereo CD player. I read the iTunes Help files to figure out
which format to use to import songs, and I decided to use Apple Lossless.
Is that the right one to burn CDs for use in regular CD players (not
computer CD players)?

However, even after setting it to import songs as Apple Lossless, it still
seems to import them as MPEG-4 AAC because the imported songs' file suffix
in my iTunes folder is .m4a and the Kind column says they are MPEG-4 Audio
Files. In addition, the Help file says that "The High Quality AAC setting
creates files that are usually less than 1 MB for each minute of music," but
the songs imported are between 20 and 35 MB each (the original AIFF files on
the CD are between 27 and 80 MB). What am I doing wrong?

In article <C045FEF9.1ACD%spat@mchsi.com>, spat <spat.RemoveThis@mchsi.com> wrote:

> [...] I read the iTunes Help files to figure out which format to use to
> import songs, and I decided to use Apple Lossless. Is that the right one
> to burn CDs for use in regular CD players (not computer CD players)?

Yes, either that or AIFF will give you maximum quality.


> However, even after setting it to import songs as Apple Lossless, it
> still seems to import them as MPEG-4 AAC because the imported songs'
> file suffix in my iTunes folder is .m4a and the Kind column says they
> are MPEG-4 Audio Files.

Wikipedia says:

"Apple Lossless data is stored within an MP4 container with the filename
extension .m4a. It is not a variant of AAC, but instead uses linear
prediction [1] similar to other lossless codecs such as FLAC and Shorten."

In other words, Apple Lossless files are MPEG-4 audio files, but not AAC.

In List view, Finder correctly identifies .m4a files as "MPEG-4 Audio
File", but in a Get Info window it calls them "MPEG-4 AAC". That's
probably because AAC was the only possibility when Apple first added MPEG-4
audio support. Finder only looks at the file extension, not inside the
file, so it can't tell whether it's AAC, Apple Lossless, or something else.


> In addition, the Help file says that "The High Quality AAC setting
> creates files that are usually less than 1 MB for each minute of music,"
> but the songs imported are between 20 and 35 MB each (the original AIFF
> files on the CD are between 27 and 80 MB). What am I doing wrong?

Apple Lossless files are typically about half the size of AIFF, so that's
what you've got.