With the current proliferation of digital audio players the importance of getting a bit perfect rip of your CD onto your player is paramount. If you care about your audio enough to play an uncompressed or lossless format, then follow this guide to set up EAC to rip your CDs to 16bit/44.1khz, their native resolution. In fact ripping to flac will ensure this resolution as the encoding is lossless.

Why Flac?

The main reasons are that it is a non-proprietary format, many players support it (those that count anyway!), and it isn’t as subject to change as other formats which means it is relatively future proof. This last point makes it ideal as an archival format. You should, if you player supports it, encode in an uncompressed format such as wav or aiff, and have a flac version for archival purposes.

The Configuration

There are three areas of configuration important to this process - EAC options, Drive options, and Compression options. I will go over each of these. These options can be found on the EAC menu. First, download EAC, being careful not to go to the Elderly Accommodation Counsel website, thank you. Install it.

EAC Options

On the Extraction tab, check “Synchronise between tracks”. You should also select “High" for both “Extraction and compression priority” and “Error recovery quality”, at the bottom. These settings can help the accuracy of the rip. The rest of the settings I go over do not affect the quality or accuracy of the rip, but are useful nonetheless, so be free to move onto Drive Options. On the General tab it is very useful to check the “Unknown CDs”  box and choose the “automatically access online metadata database” option. This means if EAC has no information about the CD (artist, album, track names), as is invariably the case, then it can search for the information online to fill in the details automatically. You can even choose the album image. For this to work you need to set up the metadata provider in Metadata options. Choose freedb and enter your email address (you won’t get spammed). You may have set this up when installing EAC. The rest of the general tab options should be obvious or don’t matter that much. On the Tools tab you will probably want to ensure “Create ‘.m3u’ playlist on extraction” is checked so that you can play the whole album from this file. On the Normalize tab make sure normalise is unchecked. We can safely ignore the rest of the tabs.

Drive Options

This is the most important area of configuration as it sets EAC up with your particular CD drive. On the Extraction Method tab click “Detect Read Features” at the bottom to automatically set this up based on your drive’s abilities. Similarly, on the Drive tab click “AutoDetect read command now”. On the Offset/Speed tab choose Current or 1x for “Speed selection”. Slower is usually more accurate. Check “Allow speed reduction during extraction”, and “Use AccurateRip with this drive”. The latter option will check the ripped file against an online database to verify accuracy. Very useful. On the Gap Detection tab try ripping with each of the “Gap/index retrieval method” options, starting with A. You should stick with the fastest. If none work, change “Detection accuracy” to “Accurate” or “Inaccurate” and try again. Once done set back to “Secure” for the best results. That’s the drive options done with.

Compression Options

The External Compression tab is what we’re interested in here. This is where we tell EAC to rip to flac using an external tool (installed when you installed EAC), and can manage how the file is created. The default options should do you well. The option “Use external program for compression” should be checked. Parameter parsing scheme should be “User Defined Encoder”. Use file extension should contain .flac. The program path should point to FLAC.EXE (the actual path will vary between windows versions). Now the setting that is most important here: Additional command line options. Mine is set to:

-6 -V -T "ARTIST=%artist%" -T "TITLE=%title%" -T "ALBUM=%albumtitle%" -T "DATE=%year%" -T "TRACKNUMBER=%tracknr%" -T "GENRE=%genre%" -T "COMMENT=%comment%" -T "BAND=%albuminterpret%" -T "ALBUMARTIST=%albuminterpret%" -T "COMPOSER=%composer%" %haslyrics%--tag-from-file=LYRICS="%lyricsfile%"%haslyrics% -T "DISCNUMBER=%cdnumber%" -T "TOTALDISCS=%totalcds%" -T "TOTALTRACKS=%numtracks%" %hascover%--picture="%coverfile%"%hascover% %source% -o %dest%

The –6 at the beginning tells flac how compressed to make the file. This is a gross simplification of what these numbers mean. The higher the number the less compressed the file. It goes up to 8. However there is a massive trade-off between the length of time to encode the file and compression gains at the higher end. For instance, according to this comparison chart, it takes 26 minutes to compress at –8 but you only get a file that is 404MB compared to 10 minutes for a file that is 406MB. The 2MB difference doesn’t seem worth it at for the extra encoding time. If you leave this option out the default is –5. You can find all the encoding options here.

In order to start compressed encoding after you have set EAC up press Shift+F6, or to start uncompressed encoding press F6.

Conclusion

It’s quite easy to setup EAC to rip your music when you have the right settings, the beauty being you only have to set them up once. One area for further investigation is the flac command line options and what affect they have on the resulting encoding. Also interesting is the difference between compressed and uncompressed files and whether our ears can tell the difference. Certainly the quality of the player components has a massive bearing on this as well as the listener, which dictate whether it is worth going to all this effort in the first place as opposed to using bog standard mp3s. As my OH says “I can’t tell the difference between internet radio through my laptop speakers and your setup”. Sigh.

References

• Much of this article was based on: http://home.scarlet.be/spb2267/
• Flac comparison with other codecs at flac's sourceforge site
• Flac encoding command line options also at flac's sourceforge site
• Ripping strategy and methodology at computer audiophile