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

Ripping
Wow, can you believe all that? Well, thankfully it's over and now the ripping fun can begin, and it is considerably easier. Insert a CD to rip. Exact Audio Copy will immediately attempt to identify the CD using freedb. EAC will then use the information obtained from freedb to label the album and each track.


Click the MP3 button on the left-hand side and sit back. Remember, Exact Audio Copy is not fast, and that's the point. By going slow and steady, EAC carefully reads, copies and verifies each bit that it extracts from the CD by comparing it to the original. When it encounters an error, it will re-read (and re-read) the trouble spot until it gets a good copy or rejects the CD as unreadable. I've seen EAC get good copies from deeply scratched CDs that other ripping programs would choke on. I've used it more than once to save a CD that was recently damaged.


The first thing EAC will do is extract the audio data from the first track into a .wav file on your drive. The speed of this will depend on your drive, but again, don't expect it to be fast. For those OCD types, EAC kindly displays the running information as it extracts.


Next, EAC passes the .wav file to the external compressor, in this case the LAME format. The LAME encoder then transcodes the .wav file into an MP3. The speed of this step will depend on your processor. It was reasonably fast on my machine.


When EAC is done ripping the CD, it will sound a tone and "Audio Extraction Complete" will appear in the extraction dialog. Click OK and EAC will present you with the ripping log. Here you can see just how good of a copy EAC was able to get from the CD. In my case, Peak level never dropped below 100%, and track quality was never below 99.9%. Very nice.