Digital Home Thoughts: Ripping the Perfect MP3 With Exact Audio Copy

When you launch Exact Audio Copy for the first time, you will be presented with the EAC setup wizard. Click Next and you will see the CD-ROM selection window. Here it will list the optical drives installed in your system. If you have multiple drives, they should all be listed here, and you can have EAC configure each of them or just one of them. You may want to do some experimentation to see which drive will get you better results, but as a general rule, more expensive, higher-end drives will give you better results than cheaper, bottom-of-the-line drives (e.g. a Plextor DVD burner will have better reading capabilities than a no-name CD-ROM). We'll concentrate on a single-drive setup here. Make sure the drive you want to use is checked and click Next.


On the next screen, Extraction Preferences, make sure the button next to 'I prefer to have accurate results' is checked and click Next. If you own a name-brand drive, EAC will likely have its configuration data in its database (it did in my case), in which case, the data will be displayed in the next screen (Feature Database). For the purposes of this article, we'll pretend I don't have a drive that's in the database, and we'll have EAC try to detect the features for my drive by clicking "I don't trust these values…" and clicking Next. The next window will inform you that it will now test your drive. Insert the CD you grabbed earlier and click Next.


After a minute or two the Feature Results window will appear showing the results of the test. Unsurprisingly, the results of my test matched the known features of my drive described in the database. Click Next to see a "Congratulations!" message, and Next again to finish the drive configuration.