Monday, July 24, 2006
Ripping the Perfect MP3 With Exact Audio Copy
Posted by Damion Chaplin in "ARTICLE" @ 08:00 AM
Ripping MP3s from your CDs can sometimes be a daunting task. Daunting enough that people are often willing to use the first program they find, which is usually supplied on a disc with their digital audio player. I know I was in the same boat until I found Exact Audio Copy, a powerful CD ripping program available for the price of a postcard. The difference was immediately clear and I never went back. Unfortunately, while EAC is a fantastic program, it is a program written by Andre Wiethoff, a student in Germany, and therefore, is still (and likely to be for a while) in beta. There's no documentation to the program, and guides and tutorials are scarce. So while I raved about this fantastic new program I found, and recommended it until I was blue in the face, the majority of my friends and family were unable to use it. I decided to write a guide: this guide. By following it from beginning to finish, you will learn to use one of the most powerful CD ripping programs available. I encourage you to try it out, even if you don't think you need to. You may be as surprised as I was at the difference.
Introduction
When I first started ripping my CDs to MP3s (wow, over five years ago), I didn't know anything about the various ripping programs, CODECs or really anything about digital music. Digital music was still relatively new at that point, and I was actually the only person I knew who even knew what an MP3 was. So, not having any sort of direction, I bumbled around on the Internet, trying to find a program that would 'rip' the music from my CDs and convert them into MP3s. Thus it was that I stumbled across dBpowerAMP Music Converter, in version 3 at that time. It boasted the fastest ripping times available. Looking at my large CD collection, I realized that sounded like a good idea to me.
Unfortunately, it was a classic case of Haste Makes Waste, and I was dismayed to find pops and crackles in the MP3s I encoded, especially near the beginning of an album. I found myself having to meticulously clean each CD, and often had to re-rip a CD as many as five times before I got a satisfactory encoding. Since I was still new to ripping, I bulldozed ahead, not realizing that better alternatives existed, eventually ripping as much as 60% of my CD collection.
Years later, I was turned on to Exact Audio Copy. In what seemed like a direct challenge to the way I had been thinking previously, EAC offered the most accurate (and slowest) ripping available. Well, of course I had to take that challenge. It was, admittedly, a complicated setup, and, in fact, I had to be shown how to do it the first time. Thankfully, it only needed to be done once, and the results were well worth the effort. How worth it? Well, let's just say I've never had to re-rip a CD since I started using Exact Audio Copy. Each and every MP3 I rip using EAC is perfect (or at least as perfect as a lossy compression scheme can get :wink:). Excited yet? Here's how to do it:
Introduction
When I first started ripping my CDs to MP3s (wow, over five years ago), I didn't know anything about the various ripping programs, CODECs or really anything about digital music. Digital music was still relatively new at that point, and I was actually the only person I knew who even knew what an MP3 was. So, not having any sort of direction, I bumbled around on the Internet, trying to find a program that would 'rip' the music from my CDs and convert them into MP3s. Thus it was that I stumbled across dBpowerAMP Music Converter, in version 3 at that time. It boasted the fastest ripping times available. Looking at my large CD collection, I realized that sounded like a good idea to me.
Unfortunately, it was a classic case of Haste Makes Waste, and I was dismayed to find pops and crackles in the MP3s I encoded, especially near the beginning of an album. I found myself having to meticulously clean each CD, and often had to re-rip a CD as many as five times before I got a satisfactory encoding. Since I was still new to ripping, I bulldozed ahead, not realizing that better alternatives existed, eventually ripping as much as 60% of my CD collection.
Years later, I was turned on to Exact Audio Copy. In what seemed like a direct challenge to the way I had been thinking previously, EAC offered the most accurate (and slowest) ripping available. Well, of course I had to take that challenge. It was, admittedly, a complicated setup, and, in fact, I had to be shown how to do it the first time. Thankfully, it only needed to be done once, and the results were well worth the effort. How worth it? Well, let's just say I've never had to re-rip a CD since I started using Exact Audio Copy. Each and every MP3 I rip using EAC is perfect (or at least as perfect as a lossy compression scheme can get :wink:). Excited yet? Here's how to do it:
