EAC Lossless Ripping Guide

This guide will only instruct you in how to make lossless audio rips of your cds. Why lossless? Assuming you don’t know what lossless is, a lossless file(s) is a complete copy of the album without errors; hence the term lossless. Before we begin, I feel that I must cover what should and should not be ripped with this guide.

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*Any album that you own yourself or have access to is acceptable to rip.

*Any thing such as a CD-R copy of an album is not acceptable to rip since the rip will not be lossless to start with. You must have the original store bought CD for this to work.

*All MP3 settings in EAC are irrelevant to this guide, and have no bearing on the quality of your rip.

This guide will work for EAC .95pb5, EAC .99pb4, and 1.0 beta 3.

1. Download Exact Audio Copy (EAC) and install it.

2. Install an accepted lossless codecs, such as FLAC or WavPack (this is what makes the files smaller; similar to a zip file but just for audio).

3. Put this file in your EAC folder: wnaspi32.dll (used for compatibility purposes).

4. EAC must be setup before you can continue.

4A. Start by opening EAC.

The settings wizard will pop up. Hit cancel. This wizard does not have access to all eac settings.

4B. Hit F12 to go to the FreeDB Options.

Enter an email address here. Hit OK to exit out of the FreeDB Options. This is needed to access the freeDB database.

4C. Hit F9 to bring up the EAC Options.

- Check Fill Up Missing Offset Samples With Silence.
- Check Synchronize Between Tracks are all that need checking here.
- Turn Error Recovery Quality to High.

4D. Now click on the General tab.

The only thing needing to be checked here, is On Unknown CDs, Automatically Access Online FreeDB Database.
Note: These options for the most part have no effect on accurate ripping. Options such as Disable ‘CD Autostart’ For Audio And Data CDs While EAC Running might give you more luck ripping copy protected CDs, but that can be done outside of EAC by holding down SHIFT before and while you insert the CD until it loads as well.
EAC .99pb3: Certain discs may cause EAC to freeze. To correct for this check “On unknown CD’s” “open CD information dialog”.

4E. Now click on the Tools tab.

Check:
- Check Use CD-Text Information In CUE Sheet Generation.
- Also check Create ‘.m3u’ Playlist On Extraction and Write m3u playlist With Extended Information below it.
- Check Automatically Write Status Report After Extraction or you will not get a log file!
- If you have a multi-core CPU then you may want to use “On extraction, start external compressors queued in the background”, then set it to your number or cores. This will reduce the total extraction time.

Notes:

-Retrieve UPC / ISRC Codes In CUE Sheet Generation isn’t required, but is always appreciated. You can also check Do Not Open External Compressor Window if you do not want to see one.

-If you have a multi-core system you can enable extra threads without jeopardizing your rip. One extra threads will be enough.

4F. Now click on the Normalize tab.

DO NOT CHECK ANYTHING ON THIS TAB.
- Normalization destroys any chance of the rip being lossless.

4G. Now click on the File name tab.

- Put in %N – %T like shown for track number, and song name. Once you are done, hit OK to exit out of the EAC Options.

Notes:

- You could change this to %D\%C\%N – %T to automatically place it in an Artist/Album folder. Example: Stone Temple Pilots\Purple\1 – Meat Plow.wav

4H. Hit F10 to bring up the Drive Options.

- A warning box will popup. Uncheck the box, and just hit OK here so it wont come back.

4I. Extraction Method Tab:

Check:
- Select ‘Secure mode’.
- Check ‘Drive Has Accurate Stream’ Feature.
- Check ‘Drive Caches Audio Data’.

Notes:
- If your drive or drives do not show up, you may need to close EAC, and put this DLL in the EAC directory…
- Not all drives support the Accurate Stream feature. To see what features your drive has click the Detect Read Features button.

4J. Now click on the Drive tab.

- Hit the button for Autodetect Read Command Now. There needs to be a CD in the drive for it to detect the read command. Whatever read command it finds, use that.

4K. Now click on the Offset / Speed tab.

- Check your drives offset in the AccurateRip Drive Database. Use the offset it gives for your drive to set the Use Read Sample Offset Correction.

Notes:
- Overread Into Lead-In And Lead-Out should usually not be checked. Only a handful of drives can do this correctly, and most are Plextors. If your drive supports it then use it but if your drive ever errors on the last track with this setting, uncheck it.
- DO NOT ASSUME THIS OFFSET WILL WORK FOR YOUR DEVICE!!!!
- EAC will auto-detect or you will need to look your drive up in the database listed above.

- When you push the “Detect read sample offset correction…” or put your first disc in you will see a dialog that will determine the correct offset for your drive.
- You will need a “key disc” of which there is not comprehensive list but since there are more than 20,000 key discs in the database you should be alright.
- If a this dialog does not come up then you have chosen a disc not in the database or is of a different pressing. Try another.

4L. Now click on the Gap Detection tab.

- Select either Detection method A, B, or C.
- Select Secure for Detection accuracy.

NOTE: One method will work better for your drive. Try them out to see which does.

4M. Now it’s time to setup the compressor. Hit F11.

- For FLAC: Make sure Use File Extension is set to .flac and in the Addition Command Line Options box, put this: -V -8 -T “artist=%a” -T “title=%t” -T “album=%g” -T “date=%y” -T “tracknumber=%n” -T “genre=%m” %s
- The extra settings: -A tukey(0.25) -A gauss(0.1875) -b 4096, may give you additional compression (~1%) at the expense of more cpu time.
- The bit rate option has no affect on the actual bit rate. Set it to anything you desire or leave alone.

- For WavPack: Make sure Use File Extension is set to .wv and in the Addition Command Line Options box, put this: -hm -w “Track=%n” -w “Title=%t” -w “Artist=%a” -w “Album=%g” -w “Date=%y” -w “Genre=%m” %s
- The bit rate option has no affect on the actual bit rate. Set it to anything you desire or leave alone.

This ends step 4.

5. Ripping the CD.

5A. You should still have a CD in your drive from an earlier step. Now hit F4 to Detect Gaps.

5B. Now make sure you have selected Append Gaps To Previous Track (Default).

5C. And then click Multiple WAV Files With Gaps (Non-compliant).

- This creates the CUE file that holds track layout information.
- if no CUE sheet is used, a program like Nero will spontaneously insert 2 seconds’ pauses between all your audio files when you burn it.

Notes:
- This process can take a while. Don’t expect it to rip at blazing speeds of 30-40x.

5E. Completing the process with Test & Copy!
- Hit CTRL + A to select all tracks. Hit SHIFT + F6 to rip, w/ test & copy, compressed files.

NOTE:
- If you want WAV, just hit F6.

It is recommend you save these settings using the profiles menu on the bottom of EAC. To do this click ‘New’ and create a profile. Then save the current settings into that profile!

6. Aftermath

Once you have completed all the steps above you should have a folder with the following contents:
- You may have to move the log file into the folder.

Now you are able to archive all your CD’s!

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