Question about EAC

2011-02-21 21:45:43

I am aware that probably what I am in need for is already posted somewhere in this forum, but I have checked and I cannot find an exact answer to what I am looking for.

Over the last years I have ripped about 400 CD's to my pc in MP3 format. Now days I have learned that the best quality in audio ripping is the lossless format FLAC, and I have been looking for the best software to start re-ripping my music collection in this format.

I have also read in several places that EAC is one of the best programs out there for this, but even I keep looking, there is something I cannot confirm.... the fact that EAC will provide the name of the songs as it rips the CDs.  In the past I have learnt that some programs, even though they work pretty well ripping the CDs to the format of my election (MP3), their database very often was so poor that I had to enter the name of every single song. This was a pain in...

Also, the only version of EAC I found is a beta version, and to be sincere, I hate beta versions. I always try to keep my windows registry as clean as possible, so I rather install an older, but stabled version.

So, could somebody confirm that I will not have to be typing names for songs, and if anyone will provide a good and available version of EAC, or even information about other software out there, free or paid, capable of doing a good job for this?

Question about EAC

Reply #1 – 2011-02-21 21:53:24

Okay, I'm going to try to do the best that I can here.  First of all, don't confuse rippers with encoders.  EAC is a ripper that rips CD's to PCM wav data.  EAC can be configured to use the encoder of choice, in this case LAME for mp3 or FLAC for loseless.  EAC also has built in support for the freedb database for tagging purposes.  It should import the correct track info and this can be edited. As far as EAC being in beta, don't worry about it.  It is more stable in beta release than many other software.  So the short of it is that, yes, EAC is probably the software that you want to use for your endeavor.

Question about EAC

Reply #2 – 2011-02-21 21:54:50

if you've already tagged your mp3s and are intending to rip the same CDs to flac, you can copy the tags from the mp3 files to your new flac files. foobar2000 can do this.

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti..._sets_of_tracks

tbh i don't know much about online tag lookup services as i prefer to tag all my music manually. but apparently dbpoweramp is very good for this. it's not free but there is a fully functional 21 day trial.

Question about EAC

Reply #3 – 2011-02-21 21:56:27

IIRC there is no such thing as a 'release' version of EAC.

Question about EAC

Reply #4 – 2011-02-21 21:59:47

Thanks for your fast replay.

I will try EAC beta version then. 

Question about EAC

Reply #5 – 2011-02-21 22:04:35

If you have any trouble with V1.0b1, I suggest you use V0.99pb5 instead.  Unless you must have UTF-16 and/or an integrated solution for grabbing album artwork, there no need for the current version.

Question about EAC

Reply #6 – 2011-02-21 22:43:38

Thanks all for your help

I have installed EAC and either I still need to learn how to use this program, or something in the EAC is not compatible with Windows 7 64-bit.

I have managed to rip to WAV format without problems, but when I try to add & browse for any external encoder, EAC stops working and shutdown.

Has anyone experienced this problem, or it is something I am doing wrong?

Question about EAC

Reply #7 – 2011-02-28 22:05:52

Hi,

If you download EAC, FLAC should be installed also.  The best thing to do is to go along with the auto-setup that is initiated at the first run of EAC.  Here you can set the defaults for ripping to FLAC.  That should eliminate to search for an external codec...

Don;t worry too much about the Beta status of EAC...  It's been that way since about forever as I recall...  But it should work just fine.

The latest version of EAC also allows you to find artwork for CD's you rip.  For finding the album / track titles, there is an option that allows you to look them up in the freedb database.  That works great, but sometimes you have to choose the correct "find".  Should not bee too hard though...

Any questions, please ask.

Regards,
Peter