For MacOSX users who stumbled on this video, don't worry! You can rip your CDs using XLD instead. I made a guide for that here: ruclips.net/video/fZLC90A0nOM/видео.html
@@nickyxie5035 Actions -> Test & Copy Selected Tracks -> Uncompressed. I would follow the settings in the video except for the compression tab as that only pertains to flac.
@@nickyxie5035 secure mode reads each sector at least twice, more if theres any damage. Test and copy rips the cd twice. A test rip and a copy rip to match the crc values together so you know that the rip was done accurately. This makes rips take 2-4x as long as using burst mode (inaccurate, ignores errors) and just copy (only rips 1 copy, cant match crcs)
Just got around to breaking out my CD collection and have ripped about 8 CDs so far. This was a life saver. Great detail and so far my rips have been perfect. Another 300 or so and I’ll be done and ready to pass on my collection to my son. Really appreciate the time spent on this.
By using the recommended settings in the video. How long is it taking you to rip each CD in "Secure mode"? Mine wants to take an hour and a half. Though if I change the one setting to "Burst mode", then it takes 30 minutes.
@@問答無用-t2y However, If the CD is in accurateRip database and You get accuracy confirmation after Burst Mode you are safe - you rip is perfect. If the CD is not in the databse or you don't get perfect rip confirmation from it - you have to use Secure Mode.
As an physical media collector, and some one who is still buying cds from new bands, I thank you! I just descovered EAC after years of doing fast simple rips with Sound Forge. I am a quality nerd when it comes to video and audio, and this helped me out a lot. Going to be ripping all my CDs into uncompressed WAV files with EAC. Thanks!
13:40 for people who installed somewhere other then the default spot here's a easy way to find the path just navigate to where you installed it and find flac.exe hit shift while right clicking and click "copy file path" then paste it ( just make sure to remove the quotes)
This is such a good tutorial! I had no prior knowledge of ripping CDs, but bought some of my favorites because I wanted high-quality files to sample in my music production, and despite having absolutely no prior knowledge, I got it all to work first try! I really love when tutorials are this structured and easy to follow. The only minor, and I mean minor, criticism that I have, is that I did have to Google how to find the flac.exe file. I think that was a little bit unclear, but besides that, absolutely fantastic tutorial. And besides, such a minor thing in a tutorial like this is still really great. Good stuff! :) Excited to rip more CDs now!
Just discovered EAC as a tool to rip CDs to FLAC format and this tutorial was quite simply excellent! Thank you so much for taking the trouble to share your knowledge!!
Its a damn shame you have so few subs. A good quality voiceover, and a full guide to get up and running, for most. Found this video looking for how to use this program, as I had no clue how to start the process yet alone get my disc to show up, and solved every problem I had and got it set up in a way that is performing perfectly. I had used a trial version of db something, which produced only corrupted tracks that no program could recognize, and feared I would spend considerable time finding a replacement that at least got that far. I already have a great DVD ripper that let me put my collection on my media server, but bought my first CD a bit ago and it wasn't able to rip CDs. Looking to get all the songs I tend to listen to on RUclips, as it is ad free music I will own and could listen to anywhere.
dBpoweramp is probably fine, it might just be the flac binary it ships with, or that you already had that is causing the corrupt tracks. There is known issues with some earlier versions of FLAC that can cause tracks to be corrupt. If you attempt to rip uncompressed wav files instead, they'd probably be fine. This issue also affects EAC tbh, and any other ripping software, since it is the conversion from wav to flac that is causing it. Not worried about subs lol, I just made this for my friends ^^
Hello Sharky, just a quick recognition for the professionalism of your guides, both in Video and written versions. As part of the community a big Thank You!!!
Excellent tutorial and right to the point. I don't need to know how a washing machine works, as long as my clothes are clean. You explained enough for me. Thank you greatly.
amazing guide. thanks so much. for some reason, i needed 3 CDs to get AccurateRip to configure properly. thank God i already had a decent CD collection to get that working.
Best tutorial ever! I watched the entire video and I don't even have any of that software downloaded. I will re-watch this again when I get around to installing the software and burning some CDs.
Very helpful. Haven't managed to get the AccurateRip to display yet, so followed the rest of the instructions. After watching the clip used the written guide you created, thank you very much!
This kept happening to me as well. I had uninstalled and reinstalled multiple times. Then I tried keeping the GD3 Metadata plugin in the original set up, and then finally got the AccurateRip to pop up! I don't know if this will help but it might be worth a shot
The other thing about logs and cue sheets is that they can be used by databases such as MusicBrainz to determine accurate Disc ID's, and even assign ISRC's to tracks on a CD and thus be able to link the same recordings (typically songs) across different albums. In general their information is good to have for any sort of database editing, on different fronts. Submitting the log also allows for AcoustID retrieval.
I've been trying to find a tutorial like this for a while. This is almost exactly what I needed. I've watched it and taken lots of notes. But there are still some pretty basic things that I don't understand or know how to do. Like how to set up a filing system. How to locate the filing system. Etc. But thanks for the great tutorial.
I have always used EAC. These days I usually just buy albums off of Qobuz and burn my own discs. But sometimes I like the older discs and rip them from the library. I think EAC produces more accurate results than other tools because of the way it rips (in blocks) vs doing a burst pass and comparing it against the AR database or comparing 2 burst passes' checksum.
Thank you, really helpful. The Character Replacements function caused big problems. They stopped the resulting files from being recognised by LMS - Logitech Media Studio. A suggested set-up for practical everyday use rather than perfect use, and for mp3 would be great also. Thanks again.
Hi, the character replacements are optional as per the video. They are however, supported by all modern music players, windows, Mac and Linux as well as iOS/Android Devices. Sorry to say but Logitech Media Studio is shit if it can't handle them, and they were chosen for practical everyday use, not for being 'perfect'. The most important factor in using character replacements is that they work on windows. This is why the defaults are hyphens and x's, precisely because they work on windows. The replacements I listed also work on windows, which makes them as practical as they will ever be. Secondly, don't use EAC if you wish to rip MP3s, the entire point of using EAC is for bit perfect quality, you're going through more effort / taking longer to rip the files to do so. If you choose to rip MP3 with EAC you will be taking at the very least 2x longer than any other program to rip the MP3 files which cannot be perfect because they are mp3 to begin with. In spite of this, there IS a section in the written guide for users who wish to rip with MP3. docs.google.com/document/d/1b1JJsuZj2TdiXs--XDvuKdhFUdKCdB_1qrmOMGkyveg/edit?usp=sharing The only differences between the two setups is changing the file path in external compression options to mp3.exe, the file extension to .mp3 and the command-line to either a MP3 V0 or MP3 320 suitable command-line (or a lesser format if you feel so inclined) Again, this is covered in the written guide should you want to waste your time ripping MP3s with EAC, specifically in the "External Compression" section.
shaRky - Thank you for taking the time and effort to produce this excellent, easy to understand and follow, video tutorial on the setup and use of the EXACT AUDIO COPY to rip CDs into the FLAC format. Your instructions saved me from "most certain" headaches in setting up this program. Thanks again!
@@danielwilder7835 based on your other comment, I imagine this is because you're on beginner mode and probably skipped thru portions of the video (since you wouldn't be on beginner mode otherwise) EAC Options > Tools > the very last setting;l turn it off. Then, go to Compression Options > External Compression then follow from 13:23 make sure you have the exact path to your flac.exe set as well, since that is a common issue. (the ending has to edit with "/flac.exe" , it can't be the folder that flac.exe is located in.
@@KitsuneNoNatsu Do this: copy the description of this video and paste it in the Windows Notepad (if you do not use Windows, use the notepad of your O.S.), because it will erase the formatation, then copy it from notepad and paste it on the EAC blank spaces. Try it. I think it will work. This was what I've done and worked very well!
Hello, I got a Sony walkman and ripped a few cds using Sony Media Center. Should I start over using this EAC? I compared songs ripped with Sony Media Center to few songs I ripped with EAC and they (flacs) were same kb vbr. Is the quality better with EAC? Should I start over? Thank you
Thank you so so much!!!! I set this up a couple years ago but just reinstalled windows so had to redo the whole thing haha, was very happy to find this video again
Why's it important to enable drive caching? EAC itself states that the option can cause unnecessary risk to the rip quality, and it takes substantially longer for the rip to complete.
The intention of this guide is to provide people with the information needed to receive a log file that scores 100% as well as a perfect copy. The log file is scored based on the settings used/not used and, because it does not take into account each specific drive model and whether they can handle c2 error correction correctly or whether they can make use of the cached data it will indiscriminately score the log with deductions if C2 Error correction is enabled and if Caches audio data is disabled. So, doesn't matter what the setting does in the end, if you want a 100% log you have to leave it enabled. As for the perfect rip aspect. This does not harm the rip in any way to leave on if your drive doesn't make use of it. So, because it's a required setting when going for a 100% log and because it can't make your perfect rip not perfect I am saying to have it enabled. You're welcome to leave it off if you're worried. I would encourage you to look for more information regarding it being damaging to your drive. I don't believe it is. Also, was the source of this information: wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=EAC_Drive_Options this link? It's 13 years old and a public wiki, it's not indicative of EACs actual stance. Edit: I Inquired further, and there are no threads in any private music communities expressing concern over this particular setting, whether you believe that or feel its sufficient to enable it is up to you.
Why did my comment I just posted disappear? I was saying I have a 40yr old CD (MJ - Thriller) that won’t rip not even at 0.1x speed. I think it’s a foreign pressing and someone told me about offset, but have no idea how to do it. Something about lead in? Or try burst mode. Cd looks new and I’m surprised it won’t work. It plays fine in a CD player but when it spins it makes a bit of noise. What would you suggest? Thank you
Enabling accuraterip (the first step in the video) determines your offset. Lead in/lead out is a setting you can enable in your Drive Settings, it only works with certain drives and the ones it doesnt work with, it causes your rips to get a suspicious position error on the last track of every disc you rip. You can try enabling it but it probably wont make the copy rip. If you go into drive settings and select either burst mode or paranoia mode, you will be able to rip the disc because neither has error correction. Any problems that eac was trying to correct will be skipped over, which usually allows you to rip the disc. Just keep in mind, doing this will cause parts of your rip to have skips, clicks and distortion assuming you encounter errors (which it sounds like you will). Damaged discs can play in cd players because the cd player is built to correct errors whereas cd drives are not. It being a foreign pressing doesnt matter for ripping, but if its genuinely 40 years old it might have disc rot which would make it, or at least parts of it unrippable. If the disc has no visible damage you could try other drives to see if one will rip it, but the "just try other drives" option is usually not available to anyone who isnt a serious fanatic with a crate of extra drives at their disposal
One thing I'm doing on my CD rips is I use canned air to blow off any dust on the CD. Then I take a microfiber cloth to clean the disk and remove any smudges. I do wonder how people get perfect rips when they have dust on their CD's as I don't see how the laser can read the data there when dust is on the CD.
@shaRky....Why do some CDs still show as a .wav file after ripping them with EAC as a flac file? Do I have to use another program now to make them flac files? I ripped a double CD set and now the folder has two differwnt songs as track 1, two different songs as track 2, etc. Edit: Apparently the program became corrupted because I reinstalled it and I already noticed that the compressed file size of songs reads correctly now. It was showing 4 or 5MB file sizes before reinstallation.
I wonder why the manufacturer of the program does not provide such settings by default, since the program assumes that it should copy music from CDs without a scratch.
I thank you for all the information and help with setup. Only thing which wasn't clear to my slow brain, was the linking pathway for FLAC being back to the EOCfolder saved in Programs. Couldn't see how you did this so quickly.
Thanks for the tutorial, Really of great help. One question: If I use another DVD/CD drive to rip, do I need to go through all the options again, or just those options under 'Drive'?
Youll need to activate accuraterip for the other drive, at most you may additionally have to change the gap detection method but besides that no, the rest of your settings will be saved. I would suggest saving profiles for each drive so that you dont have to change the settings a bit each time you switch drives
Great explination and the ripping process works perfectly. One problem I have is that even though i got the album cover saved in the folder and it shows up in eac, the album cover is not attached to to .flac files. Is there a solution to add them to the songs so the album cover shows up when I play them on my music player?
EAC doesnt embed cover art. Most music players will recognize the "cover.jpg/png" in the folder as being the cover art for the whole album and display it for each file. You can also tell most of them to recognize anything with a specific image format as being the cover art. That said, if you want to embed cover art youll have to do so after the rip is done. Music players should give you the option to (foobar2000 and musicbee for example would let you in the artwork tab) but if yours doesnt you can check out mp3tag like the other commentor mentioned
Do you know how would I compress to APE instead of FLAC? There exists a guide on HydrogenAudio but it conflicts with some things on your guide, such as "Use CRC check" and "Check for external programs return code." Should I just ignore this? Other than changing the external compressor I'm aware cli options may need to be changed but I'm not sure which. I know APE isn't the standard for sharing but it's more convenient for my personal library in some scenarios. Thanks for all your help and sorry for asking so many questions.
Change the file extension to .ape, change the path to wherever wapet.exe is, change the additional command line encoder to "%dest% -t "Artist=%artist%" -t "Title=%title%" -t "Album=%albumtitle%" -t "Year=%year%" -t "Track=%tracknr2%" -t "TotalTracks=%numtracks%" -t "Genre=%genre%" -t "Album Artist=%albumartist%" -t "DiscID=%cddbid%" "MAC.exe" %source% %dest% -c2000 -v " (without quotes) You can disable 'use crc check' but I wouldn't untick 'Check for external programs return code', and I wouldn't enable 'Add ID3 Tag'
Hi, this is the best guide i've seen on EAC. Quick question: Do you know if it possible to force the CUE Sheet to produce UTF8? I have tried for ages, but it seems some people can do it. Lots of my CD's are vintage Japanese CD's so that would save a bunch of steps!
Be on Japanese locale or emulate Japanese locale and run EAC thru your emulator. CUE sheet is decided by the locale you're on as well as the encoding the files are in at the time of you hitting "import" on one of the database entries. EAC isn't going to write your CUEs in UTF8 unless the text from the database is in UTF8, but it will write most of them in shift-js which works with japanese characters. Is there a definitive reason you NEED them to be in UTF8 btw? If it's to share to a private tracker there are no requirements for the CUE to be in a specific encoding, the only important factor of the CUE is that it preserves the timings / gaps of the disk. You're already doing that so there should be no issues. It's really simple to re-encode the cue sheets as well, I'm sure theres a number of ways to batch convert them all once you're done ripping everything to.
@@sharky1112 thank you for your reply. I thought I was looking for utf-8 cuesheets but I guess really I just need the cue sheet to display Japanese characters (and English). Yes, the database's, EAC and foobar all have no issue displaying the characters. Just can't get the cue sheet to output Japanese, it comes out as dots. I have even added utf-8 symbols in eac but the cue sheet is always ANSI. The dots don't change when encoding with notepad++ BTW, The cue sheet is important as I prefer to make an image of the album (not seperate track files), and embedding the sheet with all the details is quick in foobar. Many thanks if you can help. Also, I subbed!
@@southerncharity7928 I own a community for sharing Doujin music (independently released japanese music) and *nobody* has gotten EAC to consistently output CUE sheets in UTF8, it's not possible. A number of different people have inquired / looked into it but the only consensus is to use japanese locale to get shift-js, and sometimes if needed re-encode with unicue or CueTools. If you end up needing to use Unicue or CueTools, CueTools is pretty self explanatory and english while Unicue is Chinese and has no english translation so... here's a translation: 切换到转换字符串 (Change encoding) 输出编码 (Output Encoding) 保存（覆盖） (Save and overwrite) 另存（Save as...) To actually re-encode you'd drag the .cue file into unicue, then hit '另存'" i.imgur.com/c1fek4A.gif Unicue: github.com/kuyur/unicue/archive/master.zip CueTools: cue.tools/wiki/CUETools_Download The community may be of interest to you as well given the type of music you're ripping, if you want to check it out it's discord.gg/doujincafe
Hey, friend, can you help me, please? The AccurateRip pop-up is not showing with any disc, I tried a lot of discs, including the most popular ones. I don't know if it is because I had EAC installed before. I deleted the program and installed it again (maybe there's a residual cache file somewhere?)
EAC saves the drive's offset (The thing you're setting up by enabling AccurateRip) as a registry key. Deleting EAC doesn't remove the registry key, and if you by chance use(d) dBpoweramp, they share the same registry key so it's possible that AccurateRip has already been enabled. To confirm whether this is the case, go to "Drive Settings" (top left corner) then "Offset/Speed" and if the top half of the tab is greyed out + you are able to enable the "Enable accuraterip with this drive" button, then you already have accuraterip enabled and you can skip that step. Alternatively, maybe you enabled beginner mode which would cause you to be unable to activate accuraterip. Go to EAC Options > Tools then at the bottom make sure that beginner mode isn't enabled. Only other reasons for accuraterip to not pop up despite trying many CDs would be because either EAC doesn't have access to the internet, or the PC itself doesn't have access to the internet or; the discs are somehow all too badly damaged and EAC can't read any of them (though this is very unlikely)
@@sharky1112 thank you very much for your reply. I've figured out that I already had the AccurateRip configured from my previous EAC installation. By the way, thanks for this video and the text guide. It's awesome that you had so much work to help other people.
Thanks for great tutorial! In the extraction method tab I pressed detect read features button and it said that my drive isn't compatible with drive caches audio data feature. Should I turn that feature on or off?
You should have drive caches audio turned on if you want the log file to score 100% even if your drive cant cache audio, this is because scoring a log doesnt consider what drive you have and whether it can cache audio or not, the scoring method only cares if it was enabled or not
@@mattisyrjaniemi323 no, it only changes how fast the rip is done. If your drive can cache audio as far as i know it will make the rip take less time, but thats about it
Hey, Chief. If I am getting sync errors with the last track using the Overread into LeadIn & LeadOut, should I turn it off? Perhaps, my drive can not do it. Using a Dell DW316 WD11. Have done several tests without that box checked and did not get the same errors with the same discs (or any errors).
Overread into Lead-in and Lead-out isn't required for ripping a perfect copy of your CD so there's no harm in turning it off even if your drive was capable of using it. That said, usually if the drive can't handle the setting being enabled it will give you suspicious positions on the last track of every disk, generally in the last few seconds of the track itself. I haven't heard of it giving sync errors, but you can try turning it off and see if that fixes things.
@@sharky1112 Ok. Can confirm what you're saying. For example, I had a suspicious position for the final track of a disc at the end of that track (the literal end of the track). For the second disc of the set, I was getting a sync error on the final track. Turning it off has been working better for me. Thank you.
How would I know what directory to store something I haven't even see before. Save WHAT? Save it to Where, a FOLDER? I put stuff in folders but that is NOT a directory. I don't even know what this means.
Hi Sharky, thanks for the tutorial. This worked for me yesterday. However, I am having problems today. The files are not saved after the rip. They're not found anywhere on the pc. They are normally in the C directory. I checked all the settings. They have not been changed. Any suggestions?
Either youre ripping to a directory youre not suspecting and are just not noticing the files going there or, they are actually not being created which would give you a warning or error. In the case of the directory, go to EAC options then "Directories" then set a directory here. If all goes well they should now show up at this directory. If the files arent being created, is it just that the .wav files are not converting to flac? If so.. run EAC in admin mode as its likely flac.exe does not have permission to run thus not converting the files. Alternatively, go back and redo the compression settings "external compressor" tab If the files are not appearing at all including the .cue or .log file youre attempting to save, EAC should give you a warning when this happens, more specifically it should explicitly say that it failed to create a wav file due to X reason. To fix this "File Creation Error" youd just need to completely strip the tags added to your files then manually type them out. The issue is that there is an invalid or invisible character present causing the error to happen. If your .cue sheet is also not being created, then theres definetely a permission or storage issue. Either youve made eac unable to create files / dont have permission to save or create things using eac or, your drive is completely full. Technically, there is a third option which is that youre ripping to a server or network drive in which case it needs to be mapped as a drive in order to use it, alternatively just rip to a hdd/ssd instead. To fix the permissions issue, just run eac in admin mode. sorry for the delayed response, id imagime you figured this out by now but I only saw this comment now :(
@@sharky1112 Thank you for your response. Not sure what the problem is, but I managed to completely rip all my CD's by reinstalling EAC each time I start the computer. Usually daily. Even when the PC is asleep, EAC will cease to work the next day. Anyways, I got so used to the setup it only takes me a minute or so. Thank you for your tutorial.
Hey thank you so much for this tutorial! Just had a quick question and I'm not entirely sure how to word it, but anyway: I've followed everything you've said and the original file size on the CD is say 32MB~ per track but when extracted it's FLAC but closer to 10MB. Is there a way to extract as a .flac file while retaining the original quality/size of the file?
Sure, however a *compressed* lossless format being three times smaller than an uncompressed lossless format is expected and intended behavior. A compressed lossless format like flac undergoes no lossy compression (any compression is reversible with no quality loss) and allows users the ability to shrink a lossless file considerably at the cost of processing power to decode the file when listening to it. The amount of CPU needed for this is trivial as long as you aren't running 25+ year old hardware I suppose. If you want to retain the same *size* because you believe the bigger the size the better the quality you can either use "Actions -> Test & Copy Selected Tracks -> Uncompressed" to rip to .wav (an uncompressed lossless format) and then, convert your files to flac but ensure you don't use *any* compression when doing so as this will decrease the size of the files considerably. Or, you can continue to use the "Actions - > Test & Copy Selected Tracks -> Compressed" option but you'll need to manually edit your encoding settings to remove the level 8 compression, changing it to 0.
Try downloading the latest version of flac from their official site (iirc its ver 1.4.4) then saving it somewhere youre sure eac has permission to access. Then go to your compression tab and change the location of your flac.exe to that new location. My assumption is either you dont have permission to access flac, your location is only pointing to the folder flac.exe is located and not directly to flac.exe, or.. Youre ripping to a network drive like your NAS or something, and it doesnt have a letter mapped to it which is confusing the compressor. You can map your network drive so that it can. Also, i guess worth mentioning that RUclips auto translates the description of videos now so its possible the command line encoder is messed up if youre not an english speaker. You can try to copy it from within my google docs guide instead
@@sharky1112 I just set up EAC again on a new PC and got this error only on 2 tracks of the first CD I ripped, never happened to me before (using your tutorial). I do now rip to a new drive with an assigned letter tho which is a difference for sure. I know this is just an assumption game we are playing but I have it pointing to the correct flac.exe and my youtube doesn't try to translate the description either. Thought if permissions were messed up it would always fail or am I wrong on that? Either way I am going to try and download that flac version and try again!
@@warlordwossman5722 If it's only on two tracks, I imagine it's actually a "file creation error" which occurs when there is an invalid character within the track name(s). Check and see if they contain any invisible characters or large amounts of empty space either at the front or end of the track. This sort of thing happens when you copy the tracklist from a database site like discogs that uses a page left invisible character to format their text
@@sharky1112 strangely enough I only did those 2 tracks again and it just worked without any changes. Tagged the CD with copied titles from metal archives so no excessive amount of spaces or anything. But thank you anyways for all the help.
Hello! While configuring metadata options, the CueTools plugin doesn't seem to show up under metadata providers. Any idea why this is happening? I'm using EAC 1.6 if that helps.
No idea, besides potentially not selecting it when you first installed EAC as one of the plugins you want to have installed. You can install it after the fact, see here: cue.tools/wiki/CTDB_EAC_Plugin
Does anyone of the rippers have horrible problems with CT database recently? mI constantly have such error - track 12 has its nubmer bieng changed to 0 and if i do not spot it and re run the database get (sometimes need to do it few times or choose another DB entry) EAC always hangs when comes to ripping this mislabeled track...
Using these settings, I’m getting “Sync Errors” on Daft-Punk: Discovery and it’s stopping the rip. I switch to “Fast Mode” and that rip completes but with a notation about the sync errors on the last three tracks. I bought it second hand from a UK reseller, but the disc appears clean. I’m only having this issue with this disc. What’s the best alternative method for ripping just this disc?
If you just want to rip the contents of the disc you can enable Burst Mode, which will do so as it has no error correction, so it would just skip any problemed portions of the disc. The end result would be an imperfect rip and potentially audible differences, some pops/clicks/skips. If you want a perfect rip, you can try cleaning the disc / blowing the dust out of your cd drive and hoping for the best - re-ripping it with secure mode. If that doesn't work (and I assume it won't) the only other option you have is to try other CD drives in hopes that one has higher accuracy than your current drive and is capable of reading the disc fully. This isn't usually an option for everyone, but if you have other drives lying around you may as well try. Also, here's a perfect copy of that release: we.tl/t-VC23f4TPWf
Excellent tuto! Thanks a lot! BUT the Accurate Rip pop-up box NEVER shows up. I've being trying with a dozen of CDs ! I don't understand the problem. Any help, please ?
This set up is not working for me on W10 usuing my Pioneer BDXL (Blu-ray writable drive). AccurateRip doesn't seem to be working at all for me. It seems when AccurateRip is initialised it instead ejects the disc and a message pops saying there's no disc and also an empty window pops up. I've tried using AccuratRip in all sorts of ways now and with very popular discs but nothing happens except the aforementioned.
Hey, sorry for the late response. I asked around to see if anyone had experienced what you had and the only solution anyone noted was closing EAC, putting the CD into the drive then re-opening EAC with the disc already inside the drive. I dont know if you already tried to do this, but if not you should. If you have, I'm sorry but I have no clue what else to try.
At 11:08 I clicked “Detect Read Features” button and after a while Accurate Stream automatically became checked but grayed out, second option with cache was unchecked, and third one with errors thing was checked. Should I proceed with the detected options or manually set them to reproduce your settings?
Manually set them to what I recommended. Assuming part of your goal is a "100% log" setting these the way you have it now your logs will score 70%, -10% for defeat audio cache and -20% for C2 Error correction. It's why I didn't mention to detect your features and instead just set them up exactly how I had it.
@@sharky1112 thank you! What do you think about my other question, not sure if you seen it. Until now I ripped using Sony Media Center (it’s a Sony walkman) and resulting flac file (one of them) is same kB vbr (950kb vbr) as same song flac ripped with eac. I’m finding Sony Media Center easier to use, and also spent many hours ripping with it, is the EAC flac quality better than Sony Media Center? Both flacs are 950kb vbr, does that mean same quality?
@@justme7920 Bitrate is not indicative of quality. Only three programs are able to make a perfect copy of your CD. EAC (Windows) X Lossless Decoder (Mac) and Whipper (Linux). Sony Media Center is no exception, it does not create perfect copies. I'm sure it's faster to use another program than one of these three, but there are reasons for that. EAC has multiple settings that cause the rip to take longer in order to verify accuracy & corect any possible errors. Test & Copy rips the CD twice, when error correction occurs EAC will re-read the sectors on your cd multiple times until it is able to obtain the damaged data, if it can't you'll get a "Read/Sync Error" which will show up as either "suspicious positions" or "CRC Mismatch" on the log file, showing you that your rip is not perfect. Your CD taking 90 minutes (as per your other comment) will be due to Test & Copy making it take 2x as long + it having some minor damage which needs error correction to solve, so the speed is normal. Audibly speaking, a rip from any random software and one from EAC will likely not sound different unless there are errors present. If the CD is brand new and rips perfectly fine, they should both sound the same. The point of this guide, and the point of using EAC is to have both a bit-perfect copy of your CD, and to create a 100% log file, both of which are not needed for everybody and, if you don't care about it being perfect and are just concerned with it sounding listenable, you can use a different program.
@@sharky1112 my cd’s are in excellent to new condition. I only care in getting the best listening experience. You’re saying if cds are new they should sound the same, but if any wear EAC will make better sounding flacs?
The goal isnt to get uncompressed? Compression doesnt change the audio quality when it comes to lossless files. FLAC is a compressed lossless format, this is why we choose compressed (assuming you set FLAC in the compression options). If you choose uncompressed youd get WAV files which, while identical in sound will be up to 70% larger and unable to handle tagging.
They are identical in sound. All lossless formats are identical in sound both compressed and uncompressed. The only potential difference will be when dealing with different bit depths and sample rates. Audio from a red book standard CD is always 16bit 44.1khz though, so that is not a possibility. In short, WAV and FLAC are identical in sound, if you for whatever reason feel the need to use WAV instead just rip uncompressed.
Very handy guide, thank you for this. I don't create cue files, b/c I'd rather use the sub-directory features instead. Also I don't plan to burn CDs anymore. I'll only keep a log file for archiving purpose. However, does skipping the "Detect gaps" step affect the content of the log file?
Yeah, if you dont detect gaps they wont be appended to the previous track and so the log will indicate as such. The gaps not being appended to the previous track would mean the final 2 seconds/beginning 2 seconds or so of the tracks will differ from if you were to play the actual cd in a cd player
I have a CD collection of over 300 and want to archive them. Thanks for taking the time to post this instructional video. Is it supposed to take over an hour for each CD?
yeah, an hour is the average. You can go into drive settings and enable "spin up drive..." which may make it go signficantly faster or it may make no difference (depends on your drive)
To quote a written EAC guide "If you want to figure out whether your drive needs "Overread into Lead-in and Lead-Out" checked, you can check by temporarily unchecking "Use AccurateRip with this drive". Stick a CD in the drive and hit "Detect read sample offset correction...". If you're just doing this for the Overread, see below: ptpimg.me/df4vwi.png Check "Overread Lead-In and Lead-Out" only if the test result says that your drive can overread from both the Lead-In and Lead-Out, or if it says Lead-Out and your offset correction is positive, or if it says Lead-In and your offset correction is negative. Otherwise disable (uncheck) it." Once you've figured out if your drive is capable you'd want to re-enable 'use AccurateRip with this drive' btw.
Thanks for the great video. Mine does not come up with any album artwork on the bottom of the Metadata Lookup popup (this popup loads for a really long time), nor does it show anything on the right on the main screen. I tried a few CD's. My CUETools Options screen has more options than yours I guess cause they have updated it, but the options are similar. Any advice? Edit: I switched the provider to MusicBrainz, will that cause any issues?
I have to ask... I'm confused as to what the purpose of saving the cue file is if I'm already writing metadata in a vorbis comment on the FLAC file itself? If my intention is to keep a media library for playback in something like Foobar2000 is there any reason to hold on to it?
Cuesheets have two functions, one is not applicable here because we're ripping split tracks but if you were to rip an image rip (or range rip if you're familiar with that term) the cuesheet would be what splits the image rip into split tracks within your library. In our case, with split tracks the only purpose of the cuesheet is to retain the gap information so that one could burn the files back to a cd and maintain a 1:1 copy of the original. No, you don't have to hold onto them if you don't want to as they don't serve a purpose if you're not sharing your rips with other users and don't plan to burn the files back to a cd.
@@sharky1112 Thanks for explaining. I hadn't done any new rips in quite a while and am just now beginning to use the FLAC format so I'm trailing behind a bit.
Thanks man! This is a great guide! I wanted to note that I can't get Asian text to write onto the cuesheet following your steps. No matter what there's no option for the cuesheet to encode in UTF-8 or UTF-16 as it will always encode the sheet in ANSII. Any other work around like exporting to CDPlayer.ini is useless as I want the metadata to be transferred from EAC to each individual tracks. Now I have to create my own cuesheet in UTF-16, transfer the metadata from the ANSI to it then manually input the tags myself which is what I did not want sigh.. Is there a way to just encode the entire CD as one single .wav or .flac file with a cuesheet? I haven't figured it out. I did it long ago I believe but it's been years.
In order to get cuesheets to output in another encoding you'll need to change your locale. Being on any of the english locales will output ANSI so, change to japanese and you'll get shift-jis encoded cues instead which handles unicode characters. Keep in mind that EAC preserves the encoding of metadata submitted to the metadata provider so once and a while you'll import metadata and the cuesheet will output in some non-shift-jis format. As far as sharing these rips goes - the majority of peoples cuesheets are completely broken for unicode characters/non-latin characters and there's really no problem. The cuesheet is already "broken" when created because you're converting your files to FLAC. It only functions when the files are .wav so - people really don't look at the tags within the cuesheet, the only concern is that it retains the gaps if ever someone really wants to burn the files back to CD. When burning back to CD you'd modify the tags within the cuesheet yourself to your liking. This is to say, you can safely ignore your cuesheets tags when ripping if you're not personally burning the files back to CD. As for how to rip a single file, you choose range rip. Actions -> Copy selected range (iirc, don't have the program open rn to confirm) If you're going to rip it ""incorrectly""" per private tracker standards you may as well also not use "Test & Copy" as that will slow down the rip by 2x and, possibly change your rip settings from "Secure Mode" to "Burst Mode" to reduce your time ripping by another 2x.
Hello, I have followed your guide exactly but unfortunately I keep getting an error which is really bugging me. My log file is saying that all of my tracks are acurately ripped, but when I listen to one of the tracks there is a brief moment in the song (less than a second) where the audio just cuts out. I have played the cd back on its own and there is no issue at all. Any idea on how to solve this? Thanks.
Look in your log file on the track in question and see if either "Timing Problem(s)" "Suspicious Position(s)" or the Test CRC and Copy CRC of the track are different, these three errors would indicate there is a reasonable explination for the skip to be present. If this is the case, there isn't anything that can guarentee a perfect copy but you can try the following: If its suspicious positions/timing problems go to EAC -> Drive Options -> Offset/Speed -> disable 'lead in/lead out' If its a CRC mismatch (the test and copy crc of the track are different) you could try: Cleaning the cd then re-ripping Re-ripping just the track with audible errors Going into EAC Options - > Drive Options -> Spin up drive before extraction then re-ripping just the track with the error Trying ripping the CD with a different cd drive Things I would advise against, as there is no guarentee that it will stop crc mismatches. It might be a waste of money Buying a new drive to rip the CD then trying w/ the new drive - It's seemingly random whether the drive will be capable of obtaining the damaged sectors, some can some can't and there is no way to know until you try Buying a new copy of the CD - Some CDs are badly pressed and consistently produce CRC mismatches across multiple copies/drives DIY/Commerically resurface the existing CD/new copy if there are visible scratches - may completely ruin the CD so keep that in mind
Depends what you mean by "so long" , but if your rips are taking anywhere between 20 minutes and 2 hours that's expected. ~1h should be the average per rip. The main reason why EAC takes so long is due to two specific settings: Test & Copy which rips the CD twice, producing two seperate CRC values, the point of this setting is to verify that between two different rips, the audio EAC extracted was identical, if the data wasn't identical there'd be a "CRC Mismatch" (when the Test CRC and Copy CRC don't match) which would mean that something's off with the rip, or specific tracks in the rip. Secure Mode reads each sector of your disc twice. Then, if there is any trouble reading a specific section of the disc - it will re-read those sectors multiple times until it's able to pull all of the data (this is error correction - that thing where the blocks light up red in EAC's ripping ETA window) so at minimum this takes 2x as long to rip a CD as oppose to something that only reads the sectors once, and if any error correction needs to be applied it will take much longer to finish the rip. So TL;DR - Two settings meant to make your rip more accurate / verify that the rip was done accurately cause you to rip the CD 2 times and read the data on the disc ~4 times. If you did away with error correction, cached audio, split tracks, compressing files and test & copy you could get EAC to rip discs in ~10 minutes or so. But the end result would not be very accurate.
How can I manually set the cd cover art? I just want to add a jpg or jpeg as the cd cover but dragging the image or right clicking the box doesn't allow for adding an image, it's grayed out.
This is due to Windows being terrible. Your windows explorer has lower permissions than EAC does which forbids you from dragging images into EAC from windows explorer. There is a solution, and I will write it below but I would highly recommend just putting the cover.jpg into the folder you are ripping to. When you attach it on EAC all it does is go into the folder so just skip the middleman and put it there yourself. As for the solution, you will need to run a program with a context menu allowing you to access your files in administrator mode to give you the same permission elevation as EAC. Then, open the context menu and search for the cover art you want to put in EAC. Once found, drag it from this open context menu into EAC. Not worth it, right?
lol its rare for the first song to turn red for the hidden track . My very first test CD i used to follow along with this guide had the first song red. Flyleaf - Memento Mori.
thanks for this video! it was a great help. I do have a question though, on average how long does it take to rip a cd? I have a LG BR drive that's capable of 40x, and I feel like it all ways takes at least an hour for one rip. I have 2 other drives I can also try. but I think it's going to be the same. I do understand that it rip times can vary from cd to cd since they aren't all the same length and how damaged they are with scratches. I've considered switching over to burst mode because when I tested it, I could rip a cd in 8/12 mins.
20 mins up to 2 hours is what i see, generally that number is closer to around 30 minutes. That said, "secure mode" reads each sector twice at minimum, and if it encounters a sector it cant read it will perform "error correction" which re reads the damaged sectors over and over again (or predetermined number of times) until it can extract the data, Then, test and copy rips the cd twice. In total, secure mode and t&c increase the rip time by 4 at minimum. Burst mode with no test and copy will be significantly faster but will skip over errors if they occur. The video is meant to show which settings to use to rip a "100% log" or perfect copy but as long as no errors occur, a burst mode no t&c rip will sound exactly the same. Its understandable if you wanna go that route
My Extraction options don't include the tick off boxes "Fill up missing offset samples with silence" or "Synchronize between tracks" did I miss something?
Go to EAC Options -> Tools and then disable the "activate beginner mode, disable all advanced features" setting you have enabled. It will unhide the advanced settings (those two options and many others)
3:47 I'm just getting a pop up that says CD information & all fields are blank? Why am I not getting the "Configure Accurate rip" popup? Tried many CDs
Few possibilities, 1) You are not connected to the internet/EAC doesn't have access to the internet 2) You have 'beginner mode' enabled, to see if you do go to EAC Options -> Tools > untick "beginner mode" at the bottom if its enabled. 3) You've used EAC in the past or use(d) dBpoweramp and configured Accurip intentionally/unintentionally back then. The Accurip result is stored in a specific registry key that is shared between programs and persists even if you uninstall either one. To confirm this, you can go to EAC -> Drive Options -> Offset/Speed , if the top half of the screen is greyed out and you can enable "Use accuraterip with this drive" then, its already configured.
Thank you Sharky for the guide. Could you tell me what percentage of accuracy from accurate rip should be expected in the log file to know you have a perfect or near perfect copy of your Flacs?
Accuraterips only real purpose is to set your drives offset value for you. I assume by percentage you are looking at the "track quality" value under each track in the log? The value here only indicates the percentage of error correction that was applied to the track during the ripping process. 100% means none, 99.9% means 0.01% error correction was applied. Error correction being applied doesnt indicate it isnt perfect and in many cases will be unavoidable, so this value should be ignored. Your log file will let you know when errors are present in the ripping process. These errors indicate the rip is not perfect. If there are none then it is reasonable to assume it is as close to perfect as it can be. The errors are "timing problem(s)" "suspicious position(s)" or, the test CRC and copy CRC values do not match (called a CRC mismatch) and these errors tend to appear when EAC displays "read/sync error" during the ripping process
Great walk-thru! I did have a follow-up question, not sure if it's already been asked and/or addressed. I wasn't able to get the Cover Art to show up, is there a workaround and any other suggestions that you can pass on to correct this issue? Thanks a bunch! :)
Show up in what sense? Embedded into the files? EAC can't do that. At most, it will create a cover.jpg/png file inside of the directory where you're ripping your files. So, the workaround would be if the metadata provider doesn't provide you with cover art, just google the release and drag the cover art you find into the folder where you're ripping your files.
I know you recommend using "Secure mode " while using "Test and copy", and then along with the "Accuraterip" and the "Quetools" plugin to both also verify the accuracy of the CD rip. Though doing test CD's, I see it wants to take like an hour and a half to rip a CD that way running something like .9X speed. I noticed if I did all of the above but instead changed it to "Burst mode" that it would take around 30 minutes based on my test disc. The question is, is using "Secure mode" really worth it with having to go an extra hour per disc rip time over "Burst mode"? It's my understanding that using "Test and copy" will help verify the rip, and then using "Accuraterip" and "Quetools" both each verify the rip. And if all three of those checks say the rip is accurate, then wouldn't it be nearly a 100% chance that the rip was accurate even if using "Burst mode"? Or is it strongly recommended to use "Secure mode" anyways and just have to go an extra hour per disc rip time? Thanks.
Secure mode takes longer because it reads every sector twice, burst mode is inaccurate and can lead to inaccurate rip results. You are welcome to use burst mode if you are unwilling to wait the extra duration of time that secure mode takes but, keep in mind that the rips can no longer be verified as accurate. The only time people use burst mode is to rip problem CDs that are unable to rip on secure mode, they take the accuracy loss to at least get an almost perfect copy of the CD. Burst mode deducts 20% from the log score in case you're wondering about that as well.
@The Fantom Convoy I did do some tests on brand new CD's where I did "Secure" mode and then I did "Burst" mode and got the same check sums for both. So I'd guess you can get "accurate" with Burst mode at least in some cases. Though I have "Accurate Stream" selected for Secure even though my drive manufacturer says it doesn't support it though EAC says it does. I pretty much ripped my CD's via "Secure" mode. But I did have some old scratched CD's that didn't want to rip at some songs, and so I switched to "Burst" mode and was able to get some of those fully ripped that way. Some were gonners though.
@The Fantom Convoy Yeah, I plan to replace those scratched CD's at some point so I can rip it in "Secure" mod. But I have a lot of CD's to get as I don't like the "Remasters" stuff. I have to generally get the original release of the CD from back in the day, or sometime the German or Japan release as some like those better. There are very few remasters that I think are decent. Like some of the Black Sabbath stuff that aren't bricked out or the wav pattern touching the edges. Question, I've ripped some CD's in "Secure" mod that the CD are newish. And then I get a message at the bottom of the log on some that I guess there may be some differences and that I can use Quetools to repair even though it says everything was 'Accurate" other than a few samples. Is it best to just ignore that, or best to have Qutools repair? As I have no idea which is the better way as I have no reference if there is anything wrong with my rips. What do you normally do when that happens?
Thank you for an awesome instructional vid! I have an issue though. I want to rip a live CD into one file which displays each track name as it plays. Is this possible? Thank you!
Depends, you are able to perform a range rip which will rip the entire CD into a single file. The accompanying cuesheet you create will then split the files into individual tracks within your music player. Whatever you're using needs to support the use of cuesheets and, given you are essentially just splitting the range rip into individual tracks within the music player it would be the same thing as just ripping individual tracks imo. To do a range rip, Action -> copy range then, for the cue Action -> create cue sheet -> pick the one relating to range rips, i forget what its called.
The method is irrelevent if youre using a lossy codec. Your music player likely has a built in function for ripping cds, just use that. Pristine accurate ripping and mp3 isnt possible lol
For MacOSX users who stumbled on this video, don't worry! You can rip your CDs using XLD instead.
I made a guide for that here: ruclips.net/video/fZLC90A0nOM/видео.html
What if i just want wav did i just need to click the wav icon in the left side without need setting in the video. Right?
@@nickyxie5035 Actions -> Test & Copy Selected Tracks -> Uncompressed.
I would follow the settings in the video except for the compression tab as that only pertains to flac.
@@sharky1112it takes longer time than before follow your guide😢. I hope it perfect as you say. Right now gonna try it
@@nickyxie5035 secure mode reads each sector at least twice, more if theres any damage. Test and copy rips the cd twice. A test rip and a copy rip to match the crc values together so you know that the rip was done accurately.
This makes rips take 2-4x as long as using burst mode (inaccurate, ignores errors) and just copy (only rips 1 copy, cant match crcs)
@@sharky1112 so how about dbpoweramp which one you think make perfect rip if both of it in secure mode?
Awesome tutorial! Feels like I went from apprentice to tradesman in 20 minutes. Thank you for helping the audio community.
Just got around to breaking out my CD collection and have ripped about 8 CDs so far. This was a life saver. Great detail and so far my rips have been perfect. Another 300 or so and I’ll be done and ready to pass on my collection to my son. Really appreciate the time spent on this.
By using the recommended settings in the video. How long is it taking you to rip each CD in "Secure mode"? Mine wants to take an hour and a half. Though if I change the one setting to "Burst mode", then it takes 30 minutes.
@@colt5189 Burst mode is inaccurate.
@@問答無用-t2y However, If the CD is in accurateRip database and You get accuracy confirmation after Burst Mode you are safe - you rip is perfect. If the CD is not in the databse or you don't get perfect rip confirmation from it - you have to use Secure Mode.
@@jonrael3443 It can however lead to timing problems.
@@問答無用-t2y How? If the rip marches AR databse it is a perfect bit to bit copy of CD.
As an physical media collector, and some one who is still buying cds from new bands, I thank you! I just descovered EAC after years of doing fast simple rips with Sound Forge. I am a quality nerd when it comes to video and audio, and this helped me out a lot. Going to be ripping all my CDs into uncompressed WAV files with EAC. Thanks!
You mean flac?
flac is compressed. wav is uncompressed. @@Metalhead-4life
@@Metalhead-4lifeno. he means wav.
13:40 for people who installed somewhere other then the default spot here's a easy way to find the path just navigate to where you installed it and find flac.exe hit shift while right clicking and click "copy file path" then paste it ( just make sure to remove the quotes)
This is such a good tutorial! I had no prior knowledge of ripping CDs, but bought some of my favorites because I wanted high-quality files to sample in my music production, and despite having absolutely no prior knowledge, I got it all to work first try! I really love when tutorials are this structured and easy to follow. The only minor, and I mean minor, criticism that I have, is that I did have to Google how to find the flac.exe file. I think that was a little bit unclear, but besides that, absolutely fantastic tutorial. And besides, such a minor thing in a tutorial like this is still really great. Good stuff! :) Excited to rip more CDs now!
Just discovered EAC as a tool to rip CDs to FLAC format and this tutorial was quite simply excellent! Thank you so much for taking the trouble to share your knowledge!!
Its a damn shame you have so few subs. A good quality voiceover, and a full guide to get up and running, for most. Found this video looking for how to use this program, as I had no clue how to start the process yet alone get my disc to show up, and solved every problem I had and got it set up in a way that is performing perfectly. I had used a trial version of db something, which produced only corrupted tracks that no program could recognize, and feared I would spend considerable time finding a replacement that at least got that far.
I already have a great DVD ripper that let me put my collection on my media server, but bought my first CD a bit ago and it wasn't able to rip CDs. Looking to get all the songs I tend to listen to on RUclips, as it is ad free music I will own and could listen to anywhere.
dBpoweramp is probably fine, it might just be the flac binary it ships with, or that you already had that is causing the corrupt tracks. There is known issues with some earlier versions of FLAC that can cause tracks to be corrupt.
If you attempt to rip uncompressed wav files instead, they'd probably be fine. This issue also affects EAC tbh, and any other ripping software, since it is the conversion from wav to flac that is causing it.
Not worried about subs lol, I just made this for my friends ^^
Hello Sharky, just a quick recognition for the professionalism of your guides, both in Video and written versions. As part of the community a big Thank You!!!
Excellent tutorial and right to the point. I don't need to know how a washing machine works, as long as my clothes are clean. You explained enough for me. Thank you greatly.
This is an awesome guide! Thank you. I used to rip CDs a decade ago, and I stopped. Now I am back to it. :)
amazing guide. thanks so much. for some reason, i needed 3 CDs to get AccurateRip to configure properly. thank God i already had a decent CD collection to get that working.
Thanks for including the command-line text. Tried a few different ones and this is the only one that successfully filled in the tags.
Holly "all the info" Batman that was amazing thank you very much
I love the "beep after finished"!
What an excellent tutorial. You nailed it. Thanks a million!
Even a primary school kid can somehow understand these procedures. Thanks so much for the detailed information!
Best tutorial ever! I watched the entire video and I don't even have any of that software downloaded. I will re-watch this again when I get around to installing the software and burning some CDs.
thank you so much for putting this together. Started Ripping my CD collection and so far all is going well
Followed the directions (my ver. was slightly different), changed everything you showed. Came out perfect. Thank You !
Very helpful. Haven't managed to get the AccurateRip to display yet, so followed the rest of the instructions. After watching the clip used the written guide you created, thank you very much!
This kept happening to me as well. I had uninstalled and reinstalled multiple times. Then I tried keeping the GD3 Metadata plugin in the original set up, and then finally got the AccurateRip to pop up! I don't know if this will help but it might be worth a shot
The other thing about logs and cue sheets is that they can be used by databases such as MusicBrainz to determine accurate Disc ID's, and even assign ISRC's to tracks on a CD and thus be able to link the same recordings (typically songs) across different albums.
In general their information is good to have for any sort of database editing, on different fronts.
Submitting the log also allows for AcoustID retrieval.
I've been trying to find a tutorial like this for a while. This is almost exactly what I needed. I've watched it and taken lots of notes. But there are still some pretty basic things that I don't understand or know how to do. Like how to set up a filing system. How to locate the filing system. Etc. But thanks for the great tutorial.
I have always used EAC. These days I usually just buy albums off of Qobuz and burn my own discs. But sometimes I like the older discs and rip them from the library. I think EAC produces more accurate results than other tools because of the way it rips (in blocks) vs doing a burst pass and comparing it against the AR database or comparing 2 burst passes' checksum.
This was an amazingly detailed tutorial!
Thank you, really helpful.
The Character Replacements function caused big problems. They stopped the resulting files from being recognised by LMS - Logitech Media Studio.
A suggested set-up for practical everyday use rather than perfect use, and for mp3 would be great also.
Thanks again.
Hi, the character replacements are optional as per the video. They are however, supported by all modern music players, windows, Mac and Linux as well as iOS/Android Devices. Sorry to say but Logitech Media Studio is shit if it can't handle them, and they were chosen for practical everyday use, not for being 'perfect'.
The most important factor in using character replacements is that they work on windows. This is why the defaults are hyphens and x's, precisely because they work on windows. The replacements I listed also work on windows, which makes them as practical as they will ever be.
Secondly, don't use EAC if you wish to rip MP3s, the entire point of using EAC is for bit perfect quality, you're going through more effort / taking longer to rip the files to do so. If you choose to rip MP3 with EAC you will be taking at the very least 2x longer than any other program to rip the MP3 files which cannot be perfect because they are mp3 to begin with. In spite of this, there IS a section in the written guide for users who wish to rip with MP3.
docs.google.com/document/d/1b1JJsuZj2TdiXs--XDvuKdhFUdKCdB_1qrmOMGkyveg/edit?usp=sharing
The only differences between the two setups is changing the file path in external compression options to mp3.exe, the file extension to .mp3 and the command-line to either a MP3 V0 or MP3 320 suitable command-line (or a lesser format if you feel so inclined)
Again, this is covered in the written guide should you want to waste your time ripping MP3s with EAC, specifically in the "External Compression" section.
shaRky - Thank you for taking the time and effort to produce this excellent, easy to understand and follow, video tutorial on the setup and use of the EXACT AUDIO COPY to rip CDs into the FLAC format. Your instructions saved me from "most certain" headaches in setting up this program. Thanks again!
No problem, happy to help :)
@@sharky1112 mine is still ripping to .WAV , so annoying
@@danielwilder7835 based on your other comment, I imagine this is because you're on beginner mode and probably skipped thru portions of the video (since you wouldn't be on beginner mode otherwise)
EAC Options > Tools > the very last setting;l turn it off.
Then, go to Compression Options > External Compression then follow from 13:23
make sure you have the exact path to your flac.exe set as well, since that is a common issue. (the ending has to edit with "/flac.exe" , it can't be the folder that flac.exe is located in.
@@sharky1112 god it's taken me three hours to work this program out, nightmare... i didn''t skip, some of my gui is different to yours.
@@danielwilder7835 its only different because beginner mode is enabled, it hides all advanced settings (most of the ones you have to set)
Thank you for this tutorial, it's really over the direct and useful. Quality over the top.
Excellent job. I greatly appreciate your effort to educate the community. Now, I would like to figure out how to make CD from my saved files.
GUYS, DON'T FORGET to see the description of this video! It has all special characters showed in 9:17 and the command line, showed in 14:01 😉😊
For some reason, the special characters that I copied don't work
@@KitsuneNoNatsu Do this: copy the description of this video and paste it in the Windows Notepad (if you do not use Windows, use the notepad of your O.S.), because it will erase the formatation, then copy it from notepad and paste it on the EAC blank spaces. Try it. I think it will work. This was what I've done and worked very well!
This was a great tutorial! I've been getting back into physical media and this was very easy to understand. Bless you, laddie!
happy to help ^^
Incredible and clear tutorial.
15:40 marks the end of the setup process.
Pls make more videos! You are so good! Best description
Nice new gift. thanks! Onto ripping bad discs hopefully bring them back to better shape : )
Thank you very much sir, nicely explained and the special characters are a game changer in my entire digital organization method.
Excellent guide and backup materials.
Hello, I got a Sony walkman and ripped a few cds using Sony Media Center. Should I start over using this EAC? I compared songs ripped with Sony Media Center to few songs I ripped with EAC and they (flacs) were same kb vbr. Is the quality better with EAC? Should I start over? Thank you
Thank you so so much!!!! I set this up a couple years ago but just reinstalled windows so had to redo the whole thing haha, was very happy to find this video again
Best guide in internet, thank you.
Why's it important to enable drive caching? EAC itself states that the option can cause unnecessary risk to the rip quality, and it takes substantially longer for the rip to complete.
The intention of this guide is to provide people with the information needed to receive a log file that scores 100% as well as a perfect copy.
The log file is scored based on the settings used/not used and, because it does not take into account each specific drive model and whether they can handle c2 error correction correctly or whether they can make use of the cached data it will indiscriminately score the log with deductions if C2 Error correction is enabled and if Caches audio data is disabled. So, doesn't matter what the setting does in the end, if you want a 100% log you have to leave it enabled.
As for the perfect rip aspect. This does not harm the rip in any way to leave on if your drive doesn't make use of it.
So, because it's a required setting when going for a 100% log and because it can't make your perfect rip not perfect I am saying to have it enabled.
You're welcome to leave it off if you're worried. I would encourage you to look for more information regarding it being damaging to your drive. I don't believe it is. Also, was the source of this information: wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=EAC_Drive_Options this link? It's 13 years old and a public wiki, it's not indicative of EACs actual stance.
Edit: I Inquired further, and there are no threads in any private music communities expressing concern over this particular setting, whether you believe that or feel its sufficient to enable it is up to you.
A really great tutorial that's easy to follow and understand! Thank you for you work
Thanks a lot for the tutorial, very well done. All the important details and no fluff.
Thank you very much! Had problem with mine, was always crashing til I found your video.
Seriously very good tutorial! I saved it for futur reference... Thanks
I really appreciate the effort you put into making this tutorial, you did a fantastic job, thank you!
was looking for something like this for so long....great stuff
Why did my comment I just posted disappear?
I was saying I have a 40yr old CD (MJ - Thriller) that won’t rip not even at 0.1x speed. I think it’s a foreign pressing and someone told me about offset, but have no idea how to do it. Something about lead in? Or try burst mode. Cd looks new and I’m surprised it won’t work. It plays fine in a CD player but when it spins it makes a bit of noise. What would you suggest? Thank you
Enabling accuraterip (the first step in the video) determines your offset. Lead in/lead out is a setting you can enable in your Drive Settings, it only works with certain drives and the ones it doesnt work with, it causes your rips to get a suspicious position error on the last track of every disc you rip. You can try enabling it but it probably wont make the copy rip.
If you go into drive settings and select either burst mode or paranoia mode, you will be able to rip the disc because neither has error correction. Any problems that eac was trying to correct will be skipped over, which usually allows you to rip the disc. Just keep in mind, doing this will cause parts of your rip to have skips, clicks and distortion assuming you encounter errors (which it sounds like you will).
Damaged discs can play in cd players because the cd player is built to correct errors whereas cd drives are not.
It being a foreign pressing doesnt matter for ripping, but if its genuinely 40 years old it might have disc rot which would make it, or at least parts of it unrippable.
If the disc has no visible damage you could try other drives to see if one will rip it, but the "just try other drives" option is usually not available to anyone who isnt a serious fanatic with a crate of extra drives at their disposal
@@sharky1112 I used burst mode, no errors were found, music sounds good. No rot, looks like new. It really is that old (1982).
One thing I'm doing on my CD rips is I use canned air to blow off any dust on the CD. Then I take a microfiber cloth to clean the disk and remove any smudges. I do wonder how people get perfect rips when they have dust on their CD's as I don't see how the laser can read the data there when dust is on the CD.
It can.
@shaRky....Why do some CDs still show as a .wav file after ripping them with EAC as a flac file? Do I have to use another program now to make them flac files? I ripped a double CD set and now the folder has two differwnt songs as track 1, two different songs as track 2, etc.
Edit: Apparently the program became corrupted because I reinstalled it and I already noticed that the compressed file size of songs reads correctly now. It was showing 4 or 5MB file sizes before reinstallation.
I wonder why the manufacturer of the program does not provide such settings by default, since the program assumes that it should copy music from CDs without a scratch.
I thank you for all the information and help with setup.
Only thing which wasn't clear to my slow brain, was the linking pathway for FLAC being back to the EOCfolder saved in Programs. Couldn't see how you did this so quickly.
You can copy the path, then paste it into eac if you want to, which is what i did
Thanks for the tutorial, Really of great help. One question: If I use another DVD/CD drive to rip, do I need to go through all the options again, or just those options under 'Drive'?
Youll need to activate accuraterip for the other drive, at most you may additionally have to change the gap detection method but besides that no, the rest of your settings will be saved. I would suggest saving profiles for each drive so that you dont have to change the settings a bit each time you switch drives
Wow, What an amazing training video. Thank you so much.
Great explination and the ripping process works perfectly. One problem I have is that even though i got the album cover saved in the folder and it shows up in eac, the album cover is not attached to to .flac files. Is there a solution to add them to the songs so the album cover shows up when I play them on my music player?
I really like Mp3tag for further editing metadata of audiofiles. You could have a look at that.
EAC doesnt embed cover art. Most music players will recognize the "cover.jpg/png" in the folder as being the cover art for the whole album and display it for each file. You can also tell most of them to recognize anything with a specific image format as being the cover art.
That said, if you want to embed cover art youll have to do so after the rip is done. Music players should give you the option to (foobar2000 and musicbee for example would let you in the artwork tab) but if yours doesnt you can check out mp3tag like the other commentor mentioned
Do you know how would I compress to APE instead of FLAC? There exists a guide on HydrogenAudio but it conflicts with some things on your guide, such as "Use CRC check" and "Check for external programs return code." Should I just ignore this? Other than changing the external compressor I'm aware cli options may need to be changed but I'm not sure which. I know APE isn't the standard for sharing but it's more convenient for my personal library in some scenarios. Thanks for all your help and sorry for asking so many questions.
Change the file extension to .ape,
change the path to wherever wapet.exe is,
change the additional command line encoder to "%dest% -t "Artist=%artist%" -t "Title=%title%" -t "Album=%albumtitle%" -t "Year=%year%" -t "Track=%tracknr2%" -t "TotalTracks=%numtracks%" -t "Genre=%genre%" -t "Album Artist=%albumartist%" -t "DiscID=%cddbid%" "MAC.exe"
%source% %dest% -c2000 -v " (without quotes)
You can disable 'use crc check' but I wouldn't untick 'Check for external programs return code', and I wouldn't enable 'Add ID3 Tag'
Hi, this is the best guide i've seen on EAC. Quick question: Do you know if it possible to force the CUE Sheet to produce UTF8? I have tried for ages, but it seems some people can do it. Lots of my CD's are vintage Japanese CD's so that would save a bunch of steps!
Be on Japanese locale or emulate Japanese locale and run EAC thru your emulator. CUE sheet is decided by the locale you're on as well as the encoding the files are in at the time of you hitting "import" on one of the database entries. EAC isn't going to write your CUEs in UTF8 unless the text from the database is in UTF8, but it will write most of them in shift-js which works with japanese characters.
Is there a definitive reason you NEED them to be in UTF8 btw? If it's to share to a private tracker there are no requirements for the CUE to be in a specific encoding, the only important factor of the CUE is that it preserves the timings / gaps of the disk. You're already doing that so there should be no issues. It's really simple to re-encode the cue sheets as well, I'm sure theres a number of ways to batch convert them all once you're done ripping everything to.
@@sharky1112 thank you for your reply. I thought I was looking for utf-8 cuesheets but I guess really I just need the cue sheet to display Japanese characters (and English). Yes, the database's, EAC and foobar all have no issue displaying the characters. Just can't get the cue sheet to output Japanese, it comes out as dots. I have even added utf-8 symbols in eac but the cue sheet is always ANSI. The dots don't change when encoding with notepad++ BTW, The cue sheet is important as I prefer to make an image of the album (not seperate track files), and embedding the sheet with all the details is quick in foobar. Many thanks if you can help. Also, I subbed!
@@southerncharity7928
I own a community for sharing Doujin music (independently released japanese music) and *nobody* has gotten EAC to consistently output CUE sheets in UTF8, it's not possible. A number of different people have inquired / looked into it but the only consensus is to use japanese locale to get shift-js, and sometimes if needed re-encode with unicue or CueTools.
If you end up needing to use Unicue or CueTools, CueTools is pretty self explanatory and english while Unicue is Chinese and has no english translation so... here's a translation:
切换到转换字符串 (Change encoding)
输出编码 (Output Encoding)
保存（覆盖） (Save and overwrite)
另存（Save as...)
To actually re-encode you'd drag the .cue file into unicue, then hit '另存'"
i.imgur.com/c1fek4A.gif
Unicue: github.com/kuyur/unicue/archive/master.zip
CueTools:
cue.tools/wiki/CUETools_Download
The community may be of interest to you as well given the type of music you're ripping, if you want to check it out it's discord.gg/doujincafe
Thanks so much for this video dude! It really helped me.
Hey, friend, can you help me, please? The AccurateRip pop-up is not showing with any disc, I tried a lot of discs, including the most popular ones. I don't know if it is because I had EAC installed before. I deleted the program and installed it again (maybe there's a residual cache file somewhere?)
EAC saves the drive's offset (The thing you're setting up by enabling AccurateRip) as a registry key. Deleting EAC doesn't remove the registry key, and if you by chance use(d) dBpoweramp, they share the same registry key so it's possible that AccurateRip has already been enabled.
To confirm whether this is the case, go to "Drive Settings" (top left corner) then "Offset/Speed" and if the top half of the tab is greyed out + you are able to enable the "Enable accuraterip with this drive" button, then you already have accuraterip enabled and you can skip that step.
Alternatively, maybe you enabled beginner mode which would cause you to be unable to activate accuraterip. Go to EAC Options > Tools then at the bottom make sure that beginner mode isn't enabled.
Only other reasons for accuraterip to not pop up despite trying many CDs would be because either EAC doesn't have access to the internet, or the PC itself doesn't have access to the internet or; the discs are somehow all too badly damaged and EAC can't read any of them (though this is very unlikely)
@@sharky1112 thank you very much for your reply.
I've figured out that I already had the AccurateRip configured from my previous EAC installation.
By the way, thanks for this video and the text guide. It's awesome that you had so much work to help other people.
Thanks for great tutorial!
In the extraction method tab I pressed detect read features button and it said that my drive isn't compatible with drive caches audio data feature. Should I turn that feature on or off?
You should have drive caches audio turned on if you want the log file to score 100% even if your drive cant cache audio, this is because scoring a log doesnt consider what drive you have and whether it can cache audio or not, the scoring method only cares if it was enabled or not
Wow! That was quick answer! Thanks for information!
@@sharky1112 Does that cache audio feature affect audio quality of the final rip?
@@mattisyrjaniemi323 no, it only changes how fast the rip is done. If your drive can cache audio as far as i know it will make the rip take less time, but thats about it
Amazing job! Thanks for the guide!
Pardon-me my insistance : Despite th pop-up never shows up, I have the Accurate Rip logo at the bottom on the right corner!?!? It's really confusing!
Hey, Chief. If I am getting sync errors with the last track using the Overread into LeadIn & LeadOut, should I turn it off? Perhaps, my drive can not do it. Using a Dell DW316 WD11. Have done several tests without that box checked and did not get the same errors with the same discs (or any errors).
Overread into Lead-in and Lead-out isn't required for ripping a perfect copy of your CD so there's no harm in turning it off even if your drive was capable of using it.
That said, usually if the drive can't handle the setting being enabled it will give you suspicious positions on the last track of every disk, generally in the last few seconds of the track itself. I haven't heard of it giving sync errors, but you can try turning it off and see if that fixes things.
@@sharky1112 Ok. Can confirm what you're saying. For example, I had a suspicious position for the final track of a disc at the end of that track (the literal end of the track). For the second disc of the set, I was getting a sync error on the final track. Turning it off has been working better for me. Thank you.
How would I know what directory to store something I haven't even see before. Save WHAT? Save it to Where, a FOLDER? I put stuff in folders but that is NOT a directory. I don't even know what this means.
Hi Sharky, thanks for the tutorial. This worked for me yesterday. However, I am having problems today. The files are not saved after the rip. They're not found anywhere on the pc. They are normally in the C directory. I checked all the settings. They have not been changed. Any suggestions?
Either youre ripping to a directory youre not suspecting and are just not noticing the files going there or, they are actually not being created which would give you a warning or error.
In the case of the directory, go to EAC options then "Directories" then set a directory here. If all goes well they should now show up at this directory.
If the files arent being created, is it just that the .wav files are not converting to flac? If so.. run EAC in admin mode as its likely flac.exe does not have permission to run thus not converting the files. Alternatively, go back and redo the compression settings "external compressor" tab
If the files are not appearing at all including the .cue or .log file youre attempting to save, EAC should give you a warning when this happens, more specifically it should explicitly say that it failed to create a wav file due to X reason.
To fix this "File Creation Error" youd just need to completely strip the tags added to your files then manually type them out. The issue is that there is an invalid or invisible character present causing the error to happen.
If your .cue sheet is also not being created, then theres definetely a permission or storage issue. Either youve made eac unable to create files / dont have permission to save or create things using eac or, your drive is completely full. Technically, there is a third option which is that youre ripping to a server or network drive in which case it needs to be mapped as a drive in order to use it, alternatively just rip to a hdd/ssd instead.
To fix the permissions issue, just run eac in admin mode.
sorry for the delayed response, id imagime you figured this out by now but I only saw this comment now :(
@@sharky1112 Thank you for your response. Not sure what the problem is, but I managed to completely rip all my CD's by reinstalling EAC each time I start the computer. Usually daily. Even when the PC is asleep, EAC will cease to work the next day. Anyways, I got so used to the setup it only takes me a minute or so. Thank you for your tutorial.
I am having the same problem. I will try to reinstall.
After doing the proper ripping process so many times I've pretty much forgotten entirely about the options on the left.
Great tutorial a newbie like myself! Thank you!
Hey thank you so much for this tutorial! Just had a quick question and I'm not entirely sure how to word it, but anyway:
I've followed everything you've said and the original file size on the CD is say 32MB~ per track but when extracted it's FLAC but closer to 10MB. Is there a way to extract as a .flac file while retaining the original quality/size of the file?
Sure, however a *compressed* lossless format being three times smaller than an uncompressed lossless format is expected and intended behavior.
A compressed lossless format like flac undergoes no lossy compression (any compression is reversible with no quality loss) and allows users the ability to shrink a lossless file considerably at the cost of processing power to decode the file when listening to it. The amount of CPU needed for this is trivial as long as you aren't running 25+ year old hardware I suppose.
If you want to retain the same *size* because you believe the bigger the size the better the quality you can either use "Actions -> Test & Copy Selected Tracks -> Uncompressed" to rip to .wav (an uncompressed lossless format) and then, convert your files to flac but ensure you don't use *any* compression when doing so as this will decrease the size of the files considerably. Or, you can continue to use the "Actions - > Test & Copy Selected Tracks -> Compressed" option but you'll need to manually edit your encoding settings to remove the level 8 compression, changing it to 0.
Great video compiling this information, I really appreciate it! I'll be sharing this with others who want to rip their CD's!
hello im getting an external compression error and it stops ripping so i can acknowledge it then it saves as a wav ive tried a few things but no luck
Try downloading the latest version of flac from their official site (iirc its ver 1.4.4) then saving it somewhere youre sure eac has permission to access. Then go to your compression tab and change the location of your flac.exe to that new location.
My assumption is either you dont have permission to access flac, your location is only pointing to the folder flac.exe is located and not directly to flac.exe, or..
Youre ripping to a network drive like your NAS or something, and it doesnt have a letter mapped to it which is confusing the compressor. You can map your network drive so that it can.
Also, i guess worth mentioning that RUclips auto translates the description of videos now so its possible the command line encoder is messed up if youre not an english speaker. You can try to copy it from within my google docs guide instead
@@sharky1112 sorted thanks for your detailed reply on a relatively old video i appreciate it , liking and subbing
@@sharky1112 I just set up EAC again on a new PC and got this error only on 2 tracks of the first CD I ripped, never happened to me before (using your tutorial).
I do now rip to a new drive with an assigned letter tho which is a difference for sure.
I know this is just an assumption game we are playing but I have it pointing to the correct flac.exe and my youtube doesn't try to translate the description either. Thought if permissions were messed up it would always fail or am I wrong on that?
Either way I am going to try and download that flac version and try again!
@@warlordwossman5722 If it's only on two tracks, I imagine it's actually a "file creation error" which occurs when there is an invalid character within the track name(s). Check and see if they contain any invisible characters or large amounts of empty space either at the front or end of the track.
This sort of thing happens when you copy the tracklist from a database site like discogs that uses a page left invisible character to format their text
@@sharky1112 strangely enough I only did those 2 tracks again and it just worked without any changes.
Tagged the CD with copied titles from metal archives so no excessive amount of spaces or anything.
But thank you anyways for all the help.
Hello! While configuring metadata options, the CueTools plugin doesn't seem to show up under metadata providers. Any idea why this is happening? I'm using EAC 1.6 if that helps.
No idea, besides potentially not selecting it when you first installed EAC as one of the plugins you want to have installed.
You can install it after the fact, see here: cue.tools/wiki/CTDB_EAC_Plugin
Does anyone of the rippers have horrible problems with CT database recently? mI constantly have such error - track 12 has its nubmer bieng changed to 0 and if i do not spot it and re run the database get (sometimes need to do it few times or choose another DB entry) EAC always hangs when comes to ripping this mislabeled track...
Using these settings, I’m getting “Sync Errors” on Daft-Punk: Discovery and it’s stopping the rip. I switch to “Fast Mode” and that rip completes but with a notation about the sync errors on the last three tracks. I bought it second hand from a UK reseller, but the disc appears clean. I’m only having this issue with this disc. What’s the best alternative method for ripping just this disc?
If you just want to rip the contents of the disc you can enable Burst Mode, which will do so as it has no error correction, so it would just skip any problemed portions of the disc.
The end result would be an imperfect rip and potentially audible differences, some pops/clicks/skips.
If you want a perfect rip, you can try cleaning the disc / blowing the dust out of your cd drive and hoping for the best - re-ripping it with secure mode.
If that doesn't work (and I assume it won't) the only other option you have is to try other CD drives in hopes that one has higher accuracy than your current drive and is capable of reading the disc fully. This isn't usually an option for everyone, but if you have other drives lying around you may as well try.
Also, here's a perfect copy of that release: we.tl/t-VC23f4TPWf
Excellent tuto! Thanks a lot! BUT the Accurate Rip pop-up box NEVER shows up. I've being trying with a dozen of CDs ! I don't understand the problem. Any help, please ?
Could be that you had it configured already sometime before.
This set up is not working for me on W10 usuing my Pioneer BDXL (Blu-ray writable drive). AccurateRip doesn't seem to be working at all for me. It seems when AccurateRip is initialised it instead ejects the disc and a message pops saying there's no disc and also an empty window pops up. I've tried using AccuratRip in all sorts of ways now and with very popular discs but nothing happens except the aforementioned.
Hey, sorry for the late response. I asked around to see if anyone had experienced what you had and the only solution anyone noted was closing EAC, putting the CD into the drive then re-opening EAC with the disc already inside the drive. I dont know if you already tried to do this, but if not you should. If you have, I'm sorry but I have no clue what else to try.
At 11:08 I clicked “Detect Read Features” button and after a while Accurate Stream automatically became checked but grayed out, second option with cache was unchecked, and third one with errors thing was checked. Should I proceed with the detected options or manually set them to reproduce your settings?
Manually set them to what I recommended.
Assuming part of your goal is a "100% log" setting these the way you have it now your logs will score 70%, -10% for defeat audio cache and -20% for C2 Error correction.
It's why I didn't mention to detect your features and instead just set them up exactly how I had it.
@@sharky1112 thank you! What do you think about my other question, not sure if you seen it. Until now I ripped using Sony Media Center (it’s a Sony walkman) and resulting flac file (one of them) is same kB vbr (950kb vbr) as same song flac ripped with eac. I’m finding Sony Media Center easier to use, and also spent many hours ripping with it, is the EAC flac quality better than Sony Media Center? Both flacs are 950kb vbr, does that mean same quality?
@@justme7920 Bitrate is not indicative of quality. Only three programs are able to make a perfect copy of your CD. EAC (Windows) X Lossless Decoder (Mac) and Whipper (Linux). Sony Media Center is no exception, it does not create perfect copies.
I'm sure it's faster to use another program than one of these three, but there are reasons for that. EAC has multiple settings that cause the rip to take longer in order to verify accuracy & corect any possible errors.
Test & Copy rips the CD twice, when error correction occurs EAC will re-read the sectors on your cd multiple times until it is able to obtain the damaged data, if it can't you'll get a "Read/Sync Error" which will show up as either "suspicious positions" or "CRC Mismatch" on the log file, showing you that your rip is not perfect.
Your CD taking 90 minutes (as per your other comment) will be due to Test & Copy making it take 2x as long + it having some minor damage which needs error correction to solve, so the speed is normal.
Audibly speaking, a rip from any random software and one from EAC will likely not sound different unless there are errors present. If the CD is brand new and rips perfectly fine, they should both sound the same. The point of this guide, and the point of using EAC is to have both a bit-perfect copy of your CD, and to create a 100% log file, both of which are not needed for everybody and, if you don't care about it being perfect and are just concerned with it sounding listenable, you can use a different program.
@@sharky1112 my cd’s are in excellent to new condition. I only care in getting the best listening experience. You’re saying if cds are new they should sound the same, but if any wear EAC will make better sounding flacs?
Question. Why would we want the test to be compressed when we are trying to get no compression
Never mind I’m dumb
The goal isnt to get uncompressed? Compression doesnt change the audio quality when it comes to lossless files. FLAC is a compressed lossless format, this is why we choose compressed (assuming you set FLAC in the compression options). If you choose uncompressed youd get WAV files which, while identical in sound will be up to 70% larger and unable to handle tagging.
Hello...
Thanks for the tutorial.
Just a small query.
How different is final output/ sound quality between "compressed" and "uncompressed" files.
They are identical in sound. All lossless formats are identical in sound both compressed and uncompressed. The only potential difference will be when dealing with different bit depths and sample rates. Audio from a red book standard CD is always 16bit 44.1khz though, so that is not a possibility.
In short, WAV and FLAC are identical in sound, if you for whatever reason feel the need to use WAV instead just rip uncompressed.
Very handy guide, thank you for this.
I don't create cue files, b/c I'd rather use the sub-directory features instead. Also I don't plan to burn CDs anymore.
I'll only keep a log file for archiving purpose.
However, does skipping the "Detect gaps" step affect the content of the log file?
Yeah, if you dont detect gaps they wont be appended to the previous track and so the log will indicate as such.
The gaps not being appended to the previous track would mean the final 2 seconds/beginning 2 seconds or so of the tracks will differ from if you were to play the actual cd in a cd player
I have a CD collection of over 300 and want to archive them. Thanks for taking the time to post this instructional video. Is it supposed to take over an hour for each CD?
yeah, an hour is the average. You can go into drive settings and enable "spin up drive..." which may make it go signficantly faster or it may make no difference (depends on your drive)
How do I know if my drive is capable of Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out? I bought an "ATA DRW-24F1ST d" in 2021.
To quote a written EAC guide
"If you want to figure out whether your drive needs "Overread into Lead-in and Lead-Out" checked, you can check by temporarily unchecking "Use AccurateRip with this drive". Stick a CD in the drive and hit "Detect read sample offset correction...". If you're just doing this for the Overread, see below:
ptpimg.me/df4vwi.png
Check "Overread Lead-In and Lead-Out" only if the test result says that your drive can overread from both the Lead-In and Lead-Out, or if it says Lead-Out and your offset correction is positive, or if it says Lead-In and your offset correction is negative. Otherwise disable (uncheck) it."
Once you've figured out if your drive is capable you'd want to re-enable 'use AccurateRip with this drive' btw.
Thanks for the great video. Mine does not come up with any album artwork on the bottom of the Metadata Lookup popup (this popup loads for a really long time), nor does it show anything on the right on the main screen. I tried a few CD's. My CUETools Options screen has more options than yours I guess cause they have updated it, but the options are similar. Any advice?
Edit: I switched the provider to MusicBrainz, will that cause any issues?
Metadata doesn't effect rip quality so it would be fine to use musicbrainz as the default option.
I have to ask... I'm confused as to what the purpose of saving the cue file is if I'm already writing metadata in a vorbis comment on the FLAC file itself? If my intention is to keep a media library for playback in something like Foobar2000 is there any reason to hold on to it?
Cuesheets have two functions, one is not applicable here because we're ripping split tracks but if you were to rip an image rip (or range rip if you're familiar with that term) the cuesheet would be what splits the image rip into split tracks within your library.
In our case, with split tracks the only purpose of the cuesheet is to retain the gap information so that one could burn the files back to a cd and maintain a 1:1 copy of the original.
No, you don't have to hold onto them if you don't want to as they don't serve a purpose if you're not sharing your rips with other users and don't plan to burn the files back to a cd.
@@sharky1112 Thanks for explaining. I hadn't done any new rips in quite a while and am just now beginning to use the FLAC format so I'm trailing behind a bit.
Thanks man! This is a great guide! I wanted to note that I can't get Asian text to write onto the cuesheet following your steps. No matter what there's no option for the cuesheet to encode in UTF-8 or UTF-16 as it will always encode the sheet in ANSII. Any other work around like exporting to CDPlayer.ini is useless as I want the metadata to be transferred from EAC to each individual tracks. Now I have to create my own cuesheet in UTF-16, transfer the metadata from the ANSI to it then manually input the tags myself which is what I did not want sigh..
Is there a way to just encode the entire CD as one single .wav or .flac file with a cuesheet? I haven't figured it out. I did it long ago I believe but it's been years.
In order to get cuesheets to output in another encoding you'll need to change your locale. Being on any of the english locales will output ANSI so, change to japanese and you'll get shift-jis encoded cues instead which handles unicode characters.
Keep in mind that EAC preserves the encoding of metadata submitted to the metadata provider so once and a while you'll import metadata and the cuesheet will output in some non-shift-jis format.
As far as sharing these rips goes - the majority of peoples cuesheets are completely broken for unicode characters/non-latin characters and there's really no problem.
The cuesheet is already "broken" when created because you're converting your files to FLAC. It only functions when the files are .wav so - people really don't look at the tags within the cuesheet, the only concern is that it retains the gaps if ever someone really wants to burn the files back to CD.
When burning back to CD you'd modify the tags within the cuesheet yourself to your liking. This is to say, you can safely ignore your cuesheets tags when ripping if you're not personally burning the files back to CD.
As for how to rip a single file, you choose range rip. Actions -> Copy selected range (iirc, don't have the program open rn to confirm)
If you're going to rip it ""incorrectly""" per private tracker standards you may as well also not use "Test & Copy" as that will slow down the rip by 2x and, possibly change your rip settings from "Secure Mode" to "Burst Mode" to reduce your time ripping by another 2x.
Hello, I have followed your guide exactly but unfortunately I keep getting an error which is really bugging me. My log file is saying that all of my tracks are acurately ripped, but when I listen to one of the tracks there is a brief moment in the song (less than a second) where the audio just cuts out. I have played the cd back on its own and there is no issue at all. Any idea on how to solve this? Thanks.
Look in your log file on the track in question and see if either "Timing Problem(s)" "Suspicious Position(s)" or the Test CRC and Copy CRC of the track are different, these three errors would indicate there is a reasonable explination for the skip to be present.
If this is the case, there isn't anything that can guarentee a perfect copy but you can try the following:
If its suspicious positions/timing problems go to EAC -> Drive Options -> Offset/Speed -> disable 'lead in/lead out'
If its a CRC mismatch (the test and copy crc of the track are different) you could try:
Cleaning the cd then re-ripping
Re-ripping just the track with audible errors
Going into EAC Options - > Drive Options -> Spin up drive before extraction then re-ripping just the track with the error
Trying ripping the CD with a different cd drive
Things I would advise against, as there is no guarentee that it will stop crc mismatches. It might be a waste of money
Buying a new drive to rip the CD then trying w/ the new drive - It's seemingly random whether the drive will be capable of obtaining the damaged sectors, some can some can't and there is no way to know until you try
Buying a new copy of the CD - Some CDs are badly pressed and consistently produce CRC mismatches across multiple copies/drives
DIY/Commerically resurface the existing CD/new copy if there are visible scratches - may completely ruin the CD so keep that in mind
thank you for the tutorial
Depends what you mean by "so long" , but if your rips are taking anywhere between 20 minutes and 2 hours that's expected. ~1h should be the average per rip.
The main reason why EAC takes so long is due to two specific settings:
Test & Copy which rips the CD twice, producing two seperate CRC values, the point of this setting is to verify that between two different rips, the audio EAC extracted was identical, if the data wasn't identical there'd be a "CRC Mismatch" (when the Test CRC and Copy CRC don't match) which would mean that something's off with the rip, or specific tracks in the rip.
Secure Mode reads each sector of your disc twice. Then, if there is any trouble reading a specific section of the disc - it will re-read those sectors multiple times until it's able to pull all of the data (this is error correction - that thing where the blocks light up red in EAC's ripping ETA window) so at minimum this takes 2x as long to rip a CD as oppose to something that only reads the sectors once, and if any error correction needs to be applied it will take much longer to finish the rip.
So TL;DR - Two settings meant to make your rip more accurate / verify that the rip was done accurately cause you to rip the CD 2 times and read the data on the disc ~4 times.
If you did away with error correction, cached audio, split tracks, compressing files and test & copy you could get EAC to rip discs in ~10 minutes or so. But the end result would not be very accurate.
@@sharky1112 okay so that's fine. For me it's usually around 1-1.5hour . Thank you!
How can I manually set the cd cover art? I just want to add a jpg or jpeg as the cd cover but dragging the image or right clicking the box doesn't allow for adding an image, it's grayed out.
This is due to Windows being terrible. Your windows explorer has lower permissions than EAC does which forbids you from dragging images into EAC from windows explorer.
There is a solution, and I will write it below but I would highly recommend just putting the cover.jpg into the folder you are ripping to. When you attach it on EAC all it does is go into the folder so just skip the middleman and put it there yourself.
As for the solution, you will need to run a program with a context menu allowing you to access your files in administrator mode to give you the same permission elevation as EAC. Then, open the context menu and search for the cover art you want to put in EAC. Once found, drag it from this open context menu into EAC. Not worth it, right?
lol its rare for the first song to turn red for the hidden track . My very first test CD i used to follow along with this guide had the first song red. Flyleaf - Memento Mori.
Very useful to me. Thank you so much!!!
thanks for this video! it was a great help. I do have a question though, on average how long does it take to rip a cd? I have a LG BR drive that's capable of 40x, and I feel like it all ways takes at least an hour for one rip. I have 2 other drives I can also try. but I think it's going to be the same. I do understand that it rip times can vary from cd to cd since they aren't all the same length and how damaged they are with scratches. I've considered switching over to burst mode because when I tested it, I could rip a cd in 8/12 mins.
20 mins up to 2 hours is what i see, generally that number is closer to around 30 minutes.
That said, "secure mode" reads each sector twice at minimum, and if it encounters a sector it cant read it will perform "error correction" which re reads the damaged sectors over and over again (or predetermined number of times) until it can extract the data,
Then, test and copy rips the cd twice. In total, secure mode and t&c increase the rip time by 4 at minimum.
Burst mode with no test and copy will be significantly faster but will skip over errors if they occur.
The video is meant to show which settings to use to rip a "100% log" or perfect copy but as long as no errors occur, a burst mode no t&c rip will sound exactly the same. Its understandable if you wanna go that route
My Extraction options don't include the tick off boxes "Fill up missing offset samples with silence" or "Synchronize between tracks" did I miss something?
Go to EAC Options -> Tools and then disable the "activate beginner mode, disable all advanced features" setting you have enabled.
It will unhide the advanced settings (those two options and many others)
3:47 I'm just getting a pop up that says CD information & all fields are blank? Why am I not getting the "Configure Accurate rip" popup?
Tried many CDs
Few possibilities,
1) You are not connected to the internet/EAC doesn't have access to the internet
2) You have 'beginner mode' enabled, to see if you do go to EAC Options -> Tools > untick "beginner mode" at the bottom if its enabled.
3) You've used EAC in the past or use(d) dBpoweramp and configured Accurip intentionally/unintentionally back then. The Accurip result is stored in a specific registry key that is shared between programs and persists even if you uninstall either one. To confirm this, you can go to EAC -> Drive Options -> Offset/Speed , if the top half of the screen is greyed out and you can enable "Use accuraterip with this drive" then, its already configured.
Can you make a guide how to burn the rip? I tried many times but the original cd still sounds better than the copy. Thanks
docs.google.com/document/d/1f0ZtHC8phVccLWc-81gNNpy1HARasN07B3j0otwS0cI/edit?usp=sharing Here's a guide.
@The Fantom Convoy well after 10 years of MP3 it is Time to clean my ears with uncompressed music ! Car and hi fi in the living Room.
Thank you Sharky for the guide. Could you tell me what percentage of accuracy from accurate rip should be expected in the log file to know you have a perfect or near perfect copy of your Flacs?
Accuraterips only real purpose is to set your drives offset value for you.
I assume by percentage you are looking at the "track quality" value under each track in the log?
The value here only indicates the percentage of error correction that was applied to the track during the ripping process. 100% means none, 99.9% means 0.01% error correction was applied.
Error correction being applied doesnt indicate it isnt perfect and in many cases will be unavoidable, so this value should be ignored.
Your log file will let you know when errors are present in the ripping process. These errors indicate the rip is not perfect. If there are none then it is reasonable to assume it is as close to perfect as it can be.
The errors are "timing problem(s)" "suspicious position(s)" or, the test CRC and copy CRC values do not match (called a CRC mismatch) and these errors tend to appear when EAC displays "read/sync error" during the ripping process
Great walk-thru! I did have a follow-up question, not sure if it's already been asked and/or addressed. I wasn't able to get the Cover Art to show up, is there a workaround and any other suggestions that you can pass on to correct this issue? Thanks a bunch! :)
Show up in what sense? Embedded into the files? EAC can't do that. At most, it will create a cover.jpg/png file inside of the directory where you're ripping your files.
So, the workaround would be if the metadata provider doesn't provide you with cover art, just google the release and drag the cover art you find into the folder where you're ripping your files.
@@sharky1112 thanks!
I know you recommend using "Secure mode " while using "Test and copy", and then along with the "Accuraterip" and the "Quetools" plugin to both also verify the accuracy of the CD rip. Though doing test CD's, I see it wants to take like an hour and a half to rip a CD that way running something like .9X speed. I noticed if I did all of the above but instead changed it to "Burst mode" that it would take around 30 minutes based on my test disc.
The question is, is using "Secure mode" really worth it with having to go an extra hour per disc rip time over "Burst mode"? It's my understanding that using "Test and copy" will help verify the rip, and then using "Accuraterip" and "Quetools" both each verify the rip. And if all three of those checks say the rip is accurate, then wouldn't it be nearly a 100% chance that the rip was accurate even if using "Burst mode"? Or is it strongly recommended to use "Secure mode" anyways and just have to go an extra hour per disc rip time? Thanks.
Secure mode takes longer because it reads every sector twice, burst mode is inaccurate and can lead to inaccurate rip results. You are welcome to use burst mode if you are unwilling to wait the extra duration of time that secure mode takes but, keep in mind that the rips can no longer be verified as accurate.
The only time people use burst mode is to rip problem CDs that are unable to rip on secure mode, they take the accuracy loss to at least get an almost perfect copy of the CD.
Burst mode deducts 20% from the log score in case you're wondering about that as well.
@The Fantom Convoy I did do some tests on brand new CD's where I did "Secure" mode and then I did "Burst" mode and got the same check sums for both. So I'd guess you can get "accurate" with Burst mode at least in some cases.
Though I have "Accurate Stream" selected for Secure even though my drive manufacturer says it doesn't support it though EAC says it does.
I pretty much ripped my CD's via "Secure" mode. But I did have some old scratched CD's that didn't want to rip at some songs, and so I switched to "Burst" mode and was able to get some of those fully ripped that way. Some were gonners though.
@The Fantom Convoy Yeah, I plan to replace those scratched CD's at some point so I can rip it in "Secure" mod. But I have a lot of CD's to get as I don't like the "Remasters" stuff. I have to generally get the original release of the CD from back in the day, or sometime the German or Japan release as some like those better. There are very few remasters that I think are decent. Like some of the Black Sabbath stuff that aren't bricked out or the wav pattern touching the edges.
Question, I've ripped some CD's in "Secure" mod that the CD are newish. And then I get a message at the bottom of the log on some that I guess there may be some differences and that I can use Quetools to repair even though it says everything was 'Accurate" other than a few samples. Is it best to just ignore that, or best to have Qutools repair? As I have no idea which is the better way as I have no reference if there is anything wrong with my rips. What do you normally do when that happens?
El mejor tutorial, excelentemente explicado.
Very detailed! Thank you so much
Thank you for an awesome instructional vid! I have an issue though. I want to rip a live CD into one file which displays each track name as it plays. Is this possible?
Thank you!
Depends, you are able to perform a range rip which will rip the entire CD into a single file. The accompanying cuesheet you create will then split the files into individual tracks within your music player.
Whatever you're using needs to support the use of cuesheets and, given you are essentially just splitting the range rip into individual tracks within the music player it would be the same thing as just ripping individual tracks imo.
To do a range rip, Action -> copy range
then, for the cue Action -> create cue sheet -> pick the one relating to range rips, i forget what its called.
This process being overkill, whats the alternative for those who want pristine accurate ripping but use the mp3 extension?
Thanks
The method is irrelevent if youre using a lossy codec. Your music player likely has a built in function for ripping cds, just use that.
Pristine accurate ripping and mp3 isnt possible lol