Does FLAC preserve the exact bytestream of the CD tracks? (As an analogy, PNG is "lossless," but it won't natively preserve the metadata of a raw digital camera image.) The audio will be preserved but there might be interesting details on the CD like easter eggs, copyright text, etc. and I'm not sure FLAC would capture those.
> Does FLAC preserve the exact bytestream of the CD tracks? (As an analogy, PNG is "lossless," but it won't natively preserve the metadata of a raw digital camera image.)
No, but if that is the definition being used, neither does WAV store that data either.
> The audio will be preserved but there might be interesting details on the CD like easter eggs, copyright text, etc. and I'm not sure FLAC would capture those.
Flac does allow for storing a lot of metadata in the flac file itself, including: CUE sheet, a picture (image file), and arbitrary tags (key value pairs). So much of those could be stored in the flac file, but obtaining them (Easter eggs and the like) is dependent upon the program ripping the CD, not the file format storing the result of the rip (flac does not do CD ripping itself).
Audio CDs have less error correction than CD-ROMs. When you rip an audio CD, the drive is doing the error correction, and may give you PCM data different from what was written on it. Software like ExactAudioCopy tries the best it can, but that’s exactly that. Reading CD-ROM data is different. You can get an iso image of a data cd, but not an audio one.
This was done to both increase play time and discourage copying.
So since you’ll never get the raw redbook data off a cd, there is no reason to prefer WAV over FLAC for CD audio.
> This was done to both increase play time and discourage copying.
I doubt copying figured into the decision process (at least not a deliberate "anti-piracy" thought process).
The CD was released in 1982 [1]. This was only one year after IBM had released the original IBM PC, which came with one or two 320KB 5.25 inch floppy drives. The IBM PC did not have an official "hard drive" variant from IBM until the PC XT [3] released in 1983 (one year after the CD) and the hard drive option was a whole 10MB. When the target was replacement of the Vinyl LP player and compact cassette deck, and when their target customer base might have had 10-20MB of total storage in their personal computers (if they even had a personal computer), it would seem unbelievable to Sony and Phillips that those customers might even be capable of copying a disk holding somewhere upwards of 850-950MB of digital audio data.
And of course in the above I am overlooking that in order to "copy a CD" (as in make a digital copy) one first requires a CD drive that can interface with a PC in a digital way, and such drives did not appear until some years after the CD's release.
So with an amount of data on each disk that exceeds end users available storage by orders of magnitude, and no "CD drives interfaced digitally to computers" at the same time it seems unlikely that Sony or Phillips ever even considered that end users would be able to digitally copy CD disks.
I found that some Easter eggs weren't archived by EAC due to the fact they subly broke the CD spec. An example would be the first song of some versions of White Ladder by David Gray have a song "before" the first song. You press play then press "rewind" and the timer goes to -0:01 ... -3:45 or whatever and a song plays before the regular song at 0:00. I was tricky to hear it with a CD player because the rewind behavior was kind of undefined.
