EAC settings

http://www2.firehose.us:81/~jiggafellz/eac/index.html

Should work for you.

It is actually VERY simple. If you have any issues you can email me or post here.

-p

Thanks pc ; I will see how I get on!

Steeve

Thanks from me also, but having set EAC up by this method, I find it incredibly slow. I fear I shall die of old age by the time I've ripped a fraction of my CD collection.

Is there something wrong or is that how it's designed to work?

If you rip to an outboard drive via usb it will take significantly longer. About 6 min. or so to a local drive is normal but each system varies.

Well I have ripped my first CD with EAC!

At the moment I must confess it is pure dabbling as I haven't any sort of sensible system to work with this but am interested in going in this direction some time in the future and wanted to see how I got on with all the background stuff.

I have to agree that it did take an inordinately long time: far, far more than 6 minutes. I did however rip both to .wav and then "compressed" to .flac as well. Are the jury still out about differences between these two formats? There seem to be those that claim there are differences and others that are adamant that it's all stuff and nonsense and 'lossless is lossless'. I don't have an external HDD but would definitely need to get one if I were to rip even a fraction of my collection. Either that or buy a NAS and move stuff over to it pretty quickly.

Anyhow, all a bit theoretical at the moment as I have to wait for funds to recover after family holiday to New York, Christmas and my eldest son's 18th before considering any hi-fi expenditure for a while!

Steeve

Steeve,

Remember a couple of things.....

- LOAD CD

- OPEN EAC

- PRESS F4 (detects gaps)

- Look at the metadata Artist, Album and Year fields at the top and ensure they are as you want them. These will write as tags. If for some reason freedb cannot find the information on the disc, very rare, you will want to manually type the song names in, as well as the metadata up top.

- GOTO Action > Create Cue Sheet > Choose "Non-Compliant w/ Gaps"

This is when you will create and name the folder the FLAC are to go in. Navigate to where you want the files to be stored... Perhaps "My Music", or something. Create a new folder. I like to use a common nomenclature:
Artist - Album (Year) {Extra Info} [codec]

Ex. Radiohead - In Rainbows (2007) {Japan} [FLAC]

or

Frank Zappa - Cruising With Ruben and The Jets (1968) {VINYL 24-96 - Bizarre-Verve V65055} [FLAC]

- SAVE cue in new folder. No need to rename the cue file.
- Shift + F6.

This will open the folder you just made....
- PRESS Enter.

Away you go.....

When you properly setup EAC, you told it to do some things everytime you rip... So it will automatically create a log file, so you can ensure there are no errors. Also it will create the cue and a m3u files.

The cue will allow you you re-burn the data, in effect making an EXACT clone of the original. With pre-gap tracks, gap information, levels, hidden tracks, pre-emphasis etc....

The m3u is a playlist file usable with most players.

-p

By no means is it necessary that EAC take a long time to rip a disc. But if ripping properly it will take some time.

Without errors, it is not uncommon for a CD to take 12ish minutes if ripping properly. Longer if there is significant error correction to be performed.

To speed things up there are many things you can do, although I would not recommend them. The reason a proper EAC rip takes so long is because:

- Secure mode ripping, rather than the much faster iTunes style "Burst Mode"
- Test and Copy... It reads every track twice and compares its results.
- FLAC encoding is slow on the front-end. Designed this way as to keep the decoding very fast for playback.


You could certainly set it up as burst mode, without test and copy. And you could definitely simply burn to WAV, and cut out the encoding to FLAC step.

Things would be as quick as Foobar or iTunes at that point.

When ripping you could forgo the gap detection and cue file to save steps and time.

Although listening to an album on your media player with correct gap information, and gapless playback if sweet.


As in all things, good things come to..... blah blah blah...

Plextools is the fastest ripping software I know, much more than EAC. It is designed for Plextor drives but I think it also works with other brands drives. It is also very good extracting audio from scratched CDs.

Goldfinch,

I am curious if with its speed it still does the following:

- Secure Mode
- Test and Copy
- Gap detection / pre track gaps/songs
- MOST IMPORTANTLY - Drive offset correction

If not, on the first three, of course it will be much much faster. Like I said before, you can setup EAC to rip quickly in burst mode without t&c.

In fact, it would be easy enough to have a different profile for when you simply want a quick rip. And another for proper ripping.

Or just use iTunes.

-P

Thanks for the info, pc. Frankly I don't mind it taking a little longer if it does the business. It seems it costs no more money to get the rip right than it does to get it wrong and when I do eventually get around to ripping my CD collection I want to do it as "right" as I possibly can.

When I am in a better financial position I will no doubt demo all the different options from Naim, Linn or whoever. (And hopefully there will be some more options by then!) The thought has crossed my mind though of trying to start building up a library in readiness.

Steeve

quote:

Originally posted by pcstockton:
Goldfinch,

I am curious if with its speed it still does the following:

- Secure Mode
- Test and Copy
- Gap detection / pre track gaps/songs


- MOST IMPORTANTLY - Drive offset correction

If not, on the first three, of course it will be much much faster. Like I said before, you can setup EAC to rip quickly in burst mode without t&c.

In fact, it would be easy enough to have a different profile for when you simply want a quick rip. And another for proper ripping.

Or just use iTunes.

-P

Yes, it has those features, but I am not sure if when they are enabled is faster than EAC with the same configuration, I will check it anyway,
What I have already checked is that with the same scratched cd, plextools was able to rip without errors and EAC wasn't!

Well, it's a funny old business this digital game...

I have now ripped half a dozen discs using both EAC and dBpoweramp and I believe I can hear a difference between the two copies. It's pretty subtle and I'm not going to tell you what it is yet as you may think I am mad! I intend to try and listen through a more revealing set-up as well before making any firm conclusions; at the moment this is just through the PC soundcard and a reasonable pair of AKG headphones. I would add also that I am not someone who is prone to hearing small differences: I even struggled to hear the difference between the two sides of my LP12 felt mat despite being assured of the case!

I will say, however, that dBPoweramp is far, far quicker and easier to use than EAC - at least on my PC.

Also, I was surprised that one track on a somewhat scratched 2nd hand CD failed to rip with either program which is fair enough, but plays "perfectly" (i.e no skips, pops, clicks, silences etc.) on my CDX2.

This CD player does seem to be very good at coping with less than good CDs. I've compared scratched library discs in the past with the other CD players in my house (a Linn Genki, Sony portable and PC drives and it will usually cope the best), but at the same time is quite sensitive to poor CD-Rs. There are a number of discs that have been made by friends which play fine on all the other drives but skip all over the place on the CDX2.

What does it all mean???!! :-)

Steeve

quote:

Also, I was surprised that one track on a somewhat scratched 2nd hand CD failed to rip with either program which is fair enough, but plays "perfectly" (i.e no skips, pops, clicks, silences etc.) on my CDX2

The CDX2 is probably having problems reading this disk as well but is applying error correction. In EAC, to allow it to do the same you need to come out of secure mode. I'd suggest you try and rip the CD in secure mode initially and skip those tracks that can't be read. Then go back and rip the skipped tracks using synchronised fast mode or burst mode.

quote:

I've compared scratched library discs in the past with the other CD players in my house (a Linn Genki, Sony portable and PC drives and it will usually cope the best), but at the same time is quite sensitive to poor CD-Rs. There are a number of discs that have been made by friends which play fine on all the other drives but skip all over the place on the CDX2.

This is wholly dependent on CD-R media type and burn speed - shorter, poorly-formed pits will result in CD-Rs with poor sound and trackability.

quote:

Originally posted by Steeve:

What does it all mean???!! :-)

Steeve

It means the errors are not correctable by EAC or dbP. If you turn off error correction and rip in burst mode, it would approximate what the CDP is doing.

If you cannot hear ANYTHING in the area of where EAC is tripping up, I would be very surprised.

Basically, the error correction, as you have it set up, is much more sophisticated than a CDP. You have asked EAC to be very discriminating.

I have had a few CDs not rip at all due to extreme damage. In those cases I ripped in Foobar to WAV and coverted to FLAC.

This only happened about 5 or 6 times in thousands of rips.

*