Burn music to CD image?

Does anyone know how to burn CD quality music to a disk image or DVD from iTunes?

Add the files to a playlist, select the playlist and click Burn.
Select Data CD/DVD. The CD/DVD will be identical in size, quality, format and all other info, to what you have in iTunes.

The objective is to backup all of my iTunes purchases in one place.

The easiest way to backup iTunes is to copy the entire \Music\iTunes\ folder to an external drive.

I want the backup music to be in CD quality sound, this usually aiff format.

To be accurate an audio CD does not contain AIFF files. They are PCM in audio format. AIFF (and WAV) is simply PCM as stored on a computer.
Putting AIFF files on a CD is not the same as creating an audio CD.
If they are AAC now and you burn to an audio CD, the quality will NOT be improved over the AAC. You will simply be making the files 5x-10x larger. Also, later reimporting the audio CD as AAC, the quality will again be reduced.

So I get to repeat my question, can I burn or save music from iTunes to a disc image in the aiff format?

I would not recommend this at all for your purpose (backup). It would be a waste of time.
Burn the files to a *Data CD/DVD* and they will be identical in quality, size, all info, when you re-add then back to iTunes.
A data CD will hold ~120 songs and a Data DVD will hold ~1000 songs. The songs are exactly as on your computer.

1. Create a playlist in iTunes that contains the music you want to burn to disc. 2. Ctrl-click the playlist name and select Burn Playlist to disc.
3. Check the option for Audio CD in the Disc Format section.
4. Choose your preferred speed.
5. Click Burn.

This works for me.

What is the overall objective here? If you are trying to make back up copies of CDs there are better ways to do that. I'd just rip the CDs to Apple Lossless or FLAC (not an option with iTunes but there are other free applications that do it) and then burn those files to DVD (don't bother with images).

Keep in mind that the final copy will only be as good as the original. If you are using a lossy source format such as mp3 or AAC (m4a) you will never get a copy that is as good as the original CD. If you are trying to make an audio CD then you just have to accept the fact that it produces an excessively large file given the original format, but if you are doing this for back up purposes then it isn't worth it if you have lossy source files.

The process is similar to backing up any files that you have. Take the files in whatever format you have them - AIFF is fine if you want to maintain CD quality - and back them up by copying (via drag and drop) to an external hard drive or flash drive.

While you are at it, you can back up your photos and other valuable files in the exact same fashion.

If you ever need to do a restore, just copy them back.

You are saying that you want to back up your iTunes purchases in one place with CD quality. If those iTunes purchases were in the AAC format to begin with, converting them to aiff format isn't really going to be able to improve the quality and make them CD quality because AAC is a lossy format of compression. Thus, you will conserve space just by backing them up in the orignial format. I don't know that iTunes will make a disc image that you could put on another flash drive though. You could use Disk Utility to make a disc image. It's in the Utilities folder of Applications.

I don't know what you have your iTunes folder preferences set to in the Preferences, Advanced tab, but if you have the "Copy to iTunes Media folder..." and "Keep Media folder organized" options enabled, then it wouldn't be that difficult to find the files that you would like to make images for using another program since they would all be located in the iTunes Media folder.

Message was edited by: Grandmaster Jesh

Sorry, I said that Disk Utility could do the image for you, but I think I was wrong about that.

Unless you have certain reasons for specifically wanting to create an image, it seems that what ed2345 would be the easiest option.