are my aiff files uncompressed aiffs or their compressed counterparts?

[Achin To Be]

To copy my cd collection to my external hard drive im simply dragging and dropping said files from the cd to my macs external drive, am i right to assume this is using the uncompressed, 'cd quality' version of AIFFs?

[geefunk]

Well cd quality, yes - but they would have been compressed as part of the mastering process before getting to cd.

[Achin To Be]

naturally but all i was after was a direct representation of whats of cd, in the mean time ive heard apple lossless is a good alternative as it uses up up to half the space but is lossless as the name suggests and i think it even stores data such as artist and album details like an mp3 does, is it as good as it says on the tin?