Ripping CDs and Encoding With Lossless – How To

The tutorial is back up!

Note: I’m hosting this on the Sonic On The Net Forums because I like the format of phpBB (http://www.phpbb.com/) better.

Click on image
(http://www.soniconthenet.org/viewtopic.php?p=21211#p21211)

There are some major changes to this version of the tutorial including:
A much better layout and presentation (Discarded useless information and images).
Info on how to set up EAC to use AccurateRip. (http://www.accuraterip.com/)
A whole section on inspecting your rips and troubleshooting.
Addition information for enhancing your rips.

…and soon to come:

How to create media player compatible CUE sheets with pre-gaps and album art!
(In other words, it’ll allow You to play back your music as if it were playing directly from the CD).

How to create additional CUE sheets with ReplayGain tags.

To make sure that all of the information posted in the tutorial was correct, I submitted it to the Digital-Inn Forums (http://www.digital-inn.de/forum14/) for review.
If you have any questions or comments about the tutorial, please post them here on this forum.

Thanks for this ! It’s an excellent work ! =)

This was very helpful and informative. One thing however, I think I missed out somewhere you said…

Another plus is that you can rip a CD and encode it with lossless to your computer and copy it back to a CD, you can repeat this process over and over again without losing any quality, you can even change these formats to another format if you want (MP3, WMA, WAVE, AAC, LAME, OGG, ect).

I am interested in converting music from a CD with lossless but I don’t know how to convert it into .mp3 format whilst retaining its quality. Do I need some other program not mentioned or can this beta version do that also?

"Lossless" is for fucking faggot-ass retards. Since recording equipment can’t record nearly as good as the human ear can hear, there’s no point in trying to have "lossless" ripping. If you want "lossless" then hire the band to play for you live.

Fucking retards. Why was this bullshittery stickied, anyway? Oh, right, so that way I could find it without surfing through 80 million posts and call out on the faggotry.

This was very helpful and informative. One thing however, I think I missed out somewhere you said…

I am interested in converting music from a CD with lossless but I don’t know how to convert it into .mp3 format whilst retaining its quality. Do I need some other program not mentioned or can this beta version do that also?

mp3s are not lossless. converting from lossless to mp3 will reduce quality.

"Lossless" is for fucking faggot-ass retards. Since recording equipment can’t record nearly as good as the human ear can hear, there’s no point in trying to have "lossless" ripping. If you want "lossless" then hire the band to play for you live.

Fucking retards. Why was this bullshittery stickied, anyway? Oh, right, so that way I could find it without surfing through 80 million posts and call out on the faggotry.

heh "fucking faggot-ass retards". by fucking yourself by saying shit like that you’ve just fucking called yourself a fucking faggot-ass bitch right there, prick.

Sorry I haven’t checked in on this thread in a little while. It seems to be going…oh well, I hope it helped some of you. 🙂

I am interested in converting music from a CD with lossless but I don’t know how to convert it into .mp3 format whilst retaining its quality. Do I need some other program not mentioned or can this beta version do that also?
Well I see Sarah already answered your question. this is why converting from lossless to lossy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossy) degrades quality: Explaination + comparison graph (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1460720,00.asp)

I just thought of some reasons why people should encode their music in lossless format and upload it to this site.

Let’s just imagine that someone broke into your house. This criminal takes off with your computer, jewelry and your priceless collection of video game music!!! But wait, once you buy a new computer you can just come to this site and download your lost collection and it will be in the same exact quality as those CDs that were stolen. :angel: If you have the song "Calm Before the Storm" (http://www.mediafire.com/?fifh7tind0g) from Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of cerberus in your CD collection the criminal might be so moved by the song that he’ll turn himself in. It’s really sad :laugh: (I know, that one was a little strange :erm: )

Or what if your house burns down along with all of your valuables which happen to include your priceless collection of video game music!!! Or what if you lend the Cd out to a friend and…you know. 🙂

So in conclusion, Let Our SelveS upLoad in thE beSt poSsible format!!! 😀

Opps. Forgot how to delete. 😮

I’ll be updating this thread in the upcoming months/weeks with some new methods of encoding, I’ll also clean up in here a bit. 🙂

Why don’t you use the proper lossless configuration? I mean, this guide has the main portion of it, but it leaves out the important .log file, also the .cue sheet for those who want to burn back to CDs. You also didn’t mention read offset, or even CRC check!

Good job on the guide, of course, I’m not trying to insult you or anything. But currently, as it is, it’s leaving out some important things that would most definitely alter whether the resulting files are indeed 100% lossless or not.

OK I’ll definitely try my best to include what you’ve mentioned, you can help if you like, PM me. I’ll have to admit that I’m kinda new to EAC as I’ve only had it for a few months and have not yet explored everything it can do, but I’m learning.

Like I’ve said in my previous post I’ll eventually be updating this thread with some new info, and if anyone wants to help out I’d appreciate it. All-in-all I’m hoping to make this thread as simple and easy to understand as possible, and maybe too this will increase the interest in uploading music in [lossless] FLAC. Thanks for the comment. 🙂

I would just like to add that a nicely encoded mp3 will sound just as good as lossless. If space is an issue for some then i recommend converting the lossless files or CDs using the LAME mp3 encoder with the settings VBR -V2. Dbpoweramp comes with this encoder so i recommend using this program for converting.

Well I guess that depends on the listener. I’ve heard the best of LAME compared to encoding like FLAC and WMA9 lossless and the lossless codecs sound cleaner, crisper and have a better overall atmosphere, but that’s just me personally, others will decide for themselves.

There are better encoders out there for MP3s other then LAME. Nero AAC encoding for instance produces higher quality audio at lower bit rates – perfect for portable music players like I-Pod. I will be updating this thread in the near future with examples of how this can be done as well as some new stuff.

Well anyway, even if LAME does produce some nice quality audio there are still other advantages to encoding with FLAC, all will be explained soon.

I really do appreciate the comments and suggestions, keep it up. 🙂

Yes, from my experience i have yet to notice the difference with lossless and Lame VBR. I actually got the VBR info from an audiophile that reviewed the mp3 player i currently own (Cowon D2), which i bought mainly for playing lossless (flac etc). As you said though, it depends on the listener and the equipment they own. Mp3 is would still be preferable to most, i’m assuming, since thats what DAP players support.

Anyway, this is just my 2 cents.

thanks and maybe you know, maybe you dont.. but you have lost the picture for step 6.. i think

Hopefully someone can help me out here.

Everytime I rip a CD with Exact Audio Copy V 0.95 beta 4 with CDRDAO-Burning, the tracks come out as wav files. And it takes forever (at least 2 hours) to upload these wave files onto a file sharing site (megaupload, mediafire, etc.), in which most cases the site Iam uploading them onto tells me they’re too big to even upload. Is there a way to convert these wav files into MP3 files?

Thank you very much.

Tthese work on video game disc right?

i don’t get it
but then you have a bunch of files that you have to convert before you put it on your mp3 player…
isn’t 320kbps addequate?

I’m looking for an application that can batch tag FLAC files. I have a really good mp3 tagging app so not being able to tag multiple FLAC files annoys me… If you know any good apps, please let me know!

I’m going to put this in the update, whenever that comes around: Mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/index.html). Just open the folder with your flac files or drag and drop select files into the app and you can add all necessary tags including album art.

I actually used this program to tag this Mp3: The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time Medley (http://www.mediafire.com/?0pmwxdjjjoq)

This app is open source (FREE) and also has support for "online databases like freedb or Amazon". I hope this is useful to everyone.

I’m going to put this in the update, whenever that comes around: Mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/index.html). Just open the folder with your flac files or drag and drop select files into the app and you can add all necessary tags including album art.

I actually used this program to tag this Mp3: The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time Medley (http://www.mediafire.com/?0pmwxdjjjoq)

This app is open source (FREE) and also has support for "online databases like freedb or Amazon". I hope this is useful to everyone.

Thanks I’ll try it out immediately! 😀

Sorry that I don’t check in on this thread all that often but while I’m here I might as well answer some of your questions. 🙂

mikeman_61

thanks and maybe you know, maybe you dont.. but you have lost the picture for step 6.. i think

I’ll be changing up the pictures when I update.

ShmupFighter

Hopefully someone can help me out here.

Everytime I rip a CD with Exact Audio Copy V 0.95 beta 4 with CDRDAO-Burning, the tracks come out as wav files. And it takes forever (at least 2 hours) to upload these wave files onto a file sharing site (megaupload, mediafire, etc.), in which most cases the site Iam uploading them onto tells me they’re too big to even upload. Is there a way to convert these wav files into MP3 files?

Thank you very much.

You may not have the correct file extension type or additional command line options.

(5) Under "Use file extension" type: .flac and then browse for flac.exe (default directory: C:\Program Files\FLAC\flac.exe):

Image ()

(6) Copy and paste this to the "Additional command line options": -T "artist=%a" -T "title=%t" -T "album=%g" -T "date=%y" -T "tracknumber=%n" -T "genre=%m" %s

Image ()

TheAnubisLord

Tthese work on video game disc right?

I’m not sure of the process behind ripping music off of a video game discs. There are other programs that will do this but you’ll have to find out from someone that knows. Sorry.

If you ever do find out how to do this and you’re able to extract the PCM files from disc then you can use the instructions above to convert them to FLAC or MP3.

AnYoNe!

i don’t get it
but then you have a bunch of files that you have to convert before you put it on your mp3 player…
isn’t 320kbps addequate?

I’m sure many people are content with 320kbps but some of us prefer lossless for its perfect representation of CD quality audio, which in my experience of hearing sounds better then 320kbps even with the best encoding method. Like I’ve said before, it all depends on the persons listening to it.

Hopefully someone can help me out here.

Everytime I rip a CD with Exact Audio Copy V 0.95 beta 4 with CDRDAO-Burning, the tracks come out as wav files. And it takes forever (at least 2 hours) to upload these wave files onto a file sharing site (megaupload, mediafire, etc.), in which most cases the site Iam uploading them onto tells me they’re too big to even upload. Is there a way to convert these wav files into MP3 files?

FLAC Frontend comes with an encoder, so you open the program, import these .wav files, and compress them by clicking on the "Encode" button. If they’re still too big, compress them again with WinRAR. Hope this help.=)

I would just like to add, for the uploading portion, try using MediaFire (http://www.mediafire.com/) or anything other then MegaUpload. :notgood: I say that because MediaFire doesn’t have any download limits, and it’s pretty fast.

Just a reminder, if you do decide to use MediaFire to upload your music keep in mind that it’ll only upload 100MB per file. Use WinRar (http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm) to split the files into 100MB parts (Right-click on the file or folder you want to zip > Add to archive > (tab) General > select drop-list for "Split to volumes, bytes" > "Zip100: 98078").

When WinRar is finished, go back to MediaFire, select ‘I want to upload…’ and select the number of files you want to upload based on the number of parts WinRar split your file(s) into (Example: 5 for 5 parts). When the upload is complete, "Copy link" and post that here, there or wherever.

I hope this info is useful to you and to anyone that wants to use MediaFire. :angel:

CyberSpark

FLAC Frontend comes with an encoder, so you open the program, import these .wav files, and compress them by clicking on the "Encode" button. If they’re still too big, compress them again with WinRAR. Hope this help.=)

Thanks man. I’ll give it a try. I’ve been ripping with WMP, and it’s been working great so far.

Files were deleted

Huh? What does that mean? What files?

When I try to download EAC, clicking Download on the page your link leads to, only directs me to some ad site with no EAC to be found. Help please!

Fixed, also updated just a few things:

Latest prebeta of Exact Audio

Latest FLAC encoder (1.2.0)

Fixed a missing picture

(sigh) I installed EAC and flac, and when I try to run EAC I get an error message saying ‘Unhandled exception’, ‘ACCESS VIOLATION’. I think I give this up for now, I’ll use Spesoft Free CD Ripper as usual to rip cd:s to flac, and some limited shareware app I found somewhere to convert between wav, flac and mp3…

Well I don’t know if this is related to the topic but I just have a question to ask you guys.

Well you might know me for uploading the rare-ass Samurai Champloo Sidetracked original game music here but the game has TONS of more music that did not make it to the official game soundtrack.

I use a program called ‘adxutil’ to rip music of game cds and when I use the program to try to get the hidden music in the game, the quality is pretty horrible, it produces a insanely loud static-ky sound instead of the actual sound. I should mention that the game Samurai Champloo Sidetracked is ADX supported but it produced under the ‘Scitron’ recording company which may be the reason why all the sounds in the cd sound produces low quality bad static.

Is there anyway I can get rid of the static from all the songs and sounds? Is there a program that anyone knows of that is compatible of Scitron? Greatly appreciated if you can help me on this

Well I don’t know if this is related to the topic but I just have a question to ask you guys.

Well you might know me for uploading the rare-ass Samurai Champloo Sidetracked original game music here but the game has TONS of more music that did not make it to the official game soundtrack.

I use a program called ‘adxutil’ to rip music of game cds and when I use the program to try to get the hidden music in the game, the quality is pretty horrible, it produces a insanely loud static-ky sound instead of the actual sound. I should mention that the game Samurai Champloo Sidetracked is ADX supported but it produced under the ‘Scitron’ recording company which may be the reason why all the sounds in the cd sound produces low quality bad static.

Is there anyway I can get rid of the static from all the songs and sounds? Is there a program that anyone knows of that is compatible of Scitron? Greatly appreciated if you can help me on this

I know that this may sound strange, but try using Windows Movie Maker. I remember songs from Sim Copter having the same static and low quality problems. I’ve repaired them using Movie Maker. I’m not sure how it will work for you, but try it out if you can.

By the way, would anyone know how to rip from a catridge game (N64 games, for example)? You are able to insert discs in a computer, but cartridges are a different story.

you need to find better ways of ripping CDs to FLAC this one fucks no offence intended.

download dbpoweramp for free:

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/

put in a cd, and it should find the track names and everything for you.
next, in the lower left corner, in the "rip to" folder, chose the grey FLAC option and it will direct you to a link where you can download the FLAC addon from their page.

after that, set the compression level, output directory (you can even set the output name form so that for example the songs come out as "Chrono Cross – 01 Intro.flac" or "chrono_cross_01.flac" or whatever model you like) and then rip yourselves crazy.

easy as hell, not to mention the bonus of the program finding all the track names by itself (through accurate-rip) unless you are ripping something obscure 😉

Just to add another tip…

I’ve been using lossless encoding for a couple of years now. Not only does it produced the best sound quality, it’s also possible to create complete CD backups that can be perfectly restored if the original is ever damaged or stolen. As someone that has had a large number of CDs stolen, this was an important part of my ripping strategy. 🙂

I suggest checking out AutoFLAC at http://www.legroom.net/software/autoflac. It basically automates the processing of ripping a lossless CD with EAC, including creating the necessary .cue files for backup. It also greatly speeds up the ripping process when dealing with multiple CDs.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the link. To be honest I’ve pretty much completely given up on this thread seeing as when I posted this I really didn’t know much more then the basic principles of ripping a CD to FLAC lossless. I know a lot more now including how to make a "Proper rip" with a cue sheet, adjusting the offset correction and blah blah blah, but if what you’ve posted makes it any easier then I’m all game.

One day I’ll update this thread, one day. Maybe it’ll be with some useful information this time and something that I have full understanding about. :smrt:

Sorry to all those that weren’t fully please with my last luster thread, I promise to do better in the future.

FLAC Frontend comes with an encoder, so you open the program, import these .wav files, and compress them by clicking on the "Encode" button. If they’re still too big, compress them again with WinRAR. Hope this help.=)
LOL? WinRAR would in MANY cases make the filesize bigger… =P
FLAC is compressed almost as much it can be compressed without loosing quality, but sure, it CAN be compressed a little more, but it would take forever long time! FLAC is meant to compress really great, but also a lil fast!
I’m really looking for a tool to rip my PSX games =)
Rip em lossless would pwn!
I really hear a lot difference between high quality MP3’s (320kbps) and FLAC!! Vinyl has more space! sounds somewhat better!

Hmmmmmm……..

I know, this thread needs some work. :rolleyes:

does it work for DVD’s as well?????

I got itunes that makes apple lossless. Is this the same thing?

What about TTA files? I’m having a hard time with the AC6 OST.

I got itunes that makes apple lossless. Is this the same thing?

No. ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) is a proprietary format that’s more targeted to play on Apple software whereas FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is and open source format that’s targeted to function on as many media players as possible, even Apple itunes.

Other benefits to this codec are an easy-to-use decoder that allows persons to decode FLAC back to WAVE format which is good for burning the music back to a CD without losing any audio quality.

I hope that I explained this correctly and with little confusion. 🙂

Bahhh…

I’m using this thing called Easy CD-DA Extractor. Every time I try to extract some songs, the window just closes. Care to explain this anomaly?

No. ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) is a proprietary format that’s more targeted to play on Apple software whereas FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is and open source format that’s targeted to function on as many media players as possible, even Apple itunes.

Other benefits to this codec are an easy-to-use decoder that allows persons to decode FLAC back to WAVE format which is good for burning the music back to a CD without losing any audio quality.

I hope that I explained this correctly and with little confusion. 🙂

Well explained good sir, guess I’ll have to look for mac software to share lossless quality audio now.

Well explained good sir, guess I’ll have to look for mac software to share lossless quality audio now.

Oh yeah I forgot to mention that FLAC is multi-platform so you can download it for Mac (http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Audio/MacFLAC.shtml) as well.

Nice Tut.

I like the tut.

Can I rip sound effects that way too?
For example…Dirge of Cerberus?
Or other games?

What!? You actually like this tutorial? Well that equals 2 of you. :laugh: Yell you could record the sound effect using a wave editor program like Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) but it doesn’t make any sense to encode it into lossless.

If you want a higher then Mp3 quality encoding (although not lossless) then I suggest something like Mp4/m4a encoding which has pretty much the same level of compression as a high quality Mp3 but it has better quality sound.

You can pretty much use the same tutorial here but with some slight variations, like downloading and installing the Nero AAC codec (http://www.nero.com/eng/nero-aac-codec.html) and changing the "Use file extension" within Exact Audio Copy to .m4a and changing the "Additional command line options" to this:

-q 0.95 -if %s -of %d && D:\Codecs\NeroAAC\Neroaactag.exe %d -meta:artist="%a" -meta:album="%g" -meta:track="%n" -meta:title="%t" -meta:genre="%m" -meta:year="%y"

I did download the codecs,but I can’t install them though…

those are just some batch files…

*being N00B*

how to rip the audio without sfx from game trailers?

thanks for help 🙂

My Threads:
Thread 49437
Thread 49439

Thank you for this it’s very informative

thanks, very helpful ^^

I know I know, I just don’t want to post another tutorial prematurely so I’m holding off a little while longer until I’m able to post accurate information. When I finally find the time I’ll finish it up and post it, so please, a little more patience. 🙂

I don’t know where else to ask this question, and this thread seems like the most relevant/related thread to my question.

I’ve been wanting to make a game rip of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo from the Capcom Classics Collection Volume 2 (CCC2 for short), but when I feed the sound from my ps2 to my stereo, and then from line out on my stereo to line in on my pc, the volume of the music from the ps2 is very low and has lot of static in it. Is there a way to get an adapter to convert the left and right stereo cords from my ps2 directly to a single plug line in on my PC? (I hope that question made sense heh). Or if that’s not possible, what other way do I have of ripping the music without getting very low volume and static? Thanks, and from what I’ve seen nobody on FFS has made a game rip of this (other than the CPS2 Arcade version of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, but that link is dead now), so someone would probably appreciate me uploading my game rip once I’ve done it.

if you have a CD you can just rip it using CDEX its a freeware program

How can I rip music’s from play station? In other words, continuous music that never ends when I play, like Final Fantasy, Crisis Beat.

I want rip the music from Speed Power Gunbike, but I don’t now how to do.

Well I see Sarah already answered your question. this is why converting from lossless tolossy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossy) degrades quality: Explaination + comparison graph (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1460720,00.asp)

Is it really that important, though? Unless you can actually hear a difference without "training your ears" or something(such as: mp3s at less than 160 kb/s, wmas at less than 128 kb/s, compressed .wavs, low quality .oggs, etc.), there’s really no point in lossless compression. Maybe I’m just not an audiophile, but I can’t hear any difference between an uncompressed .wav, a 320 kb/s mp3, or a 160 kb/s mp3. Lossless just takes up unnecessary space on your hard drive, in my opinion.

I know it took awhile but I finally updated this tutorial. 😀 It’s chock-full of information that I’ve collected though asking various questions throughout website as well as some trial and error.

There’s way more in here then most other tutorials, it’ll even show you how to do the reverse and burn data that you receive in this way back onto CD and also ways of tagging the audio and uploading to sites like this one or for archival purposes.

I hope that everyone here finds this info to be useful. I been wanting a proper lossless guild here for awhile now. 🙂
Please tell me if anything is inaccurate, or perhaps to confusing so that I can make adjustments.

i have frequented enough audio production forums to say this simply:

true lossless/320kbps quality: good for keeping your ears healthy. all the sound frequencies are not mistranslated

quality other than that: bad. because as what others have said, the representation of the actual recording is lost and your judgement of quality recordings will also become skewed.

+one example i had was i was playing music at a gathering and i had mashed up a hip hop breakbeat over final fantasy viii – breezy playing at 128kbps on them "big ass" speakers. nevermind the hip hop beat but the point is the guitars sounded like shit. then i complained how bad it was and asked my cousin’s cd copy. we started fighting and we started comparing the quality played at the same volume (haha). big difference, let me tell you.

i dont know, take what i said for what it is, it’s just my opinion that i would prefer quality representations so that i can complain later in life about how my grandchildrens’ screams are ear piercing.

p.s. ipod earphones are the worst

excellent work and well done.

Another way to rip CDs comes automatically with every computer: Windows Media Player. What you after you open Windows Media Player is click on ‘view’ and select ‘full mode’, then select ‘rip’, then insert the CD you want to rip and press ‘rip’.

Hehe. 🙂 Well WMP is one way of doing it but it lacks some crucial features and abilities that Exact Audio Copy has. The purpose of my guide is to show how to make an "exact" copy of an audio CD (both for archiving and recreating of a physical disc).

For one thing, WMP lacks Error Recovery which EAC uses to correct flawed or missing samples. Another thing that WMP lacks is Drive Offset correction, seeing as WMP will read/rip a CD as is without correcting your CD/DVD-ROM drive’s sample offsets.

There are a ton of other things that WMP is missing which prevent it from making "exact" audio copies but yes, it is a nice and easy way to rip CDs for those that don’t care about all of the above stuff.

GREAT job cyberspark. Very informative. I always wondered what everyone was talking about when they said ripped lossless copy with EAC.

I’ll be sure to go an punch my brother.

He said that EAC stood for eagles always crap…which, to be fair all living things do. Not just eagles. Why single them out?

Lol. Glad I could help. 🙂 I might do a small update soon.

So if you insert an Xbox / PS1/ PS2 etc disc, you should be able to rip the audio off it? Or does this only work with ISO files?

I went all the way to the actual ripping step. I inserted Crash Bandicoot 2 for PS1, but it says that there is no CD in the drive.

Nope, sorry, this program doesn’t work that way, it’ll only rip CDs with audio tracks on it. There are other site like hcs64 (forums) that can help you with your request.

GOD I LOVE THIS FORUM!!!
i’ve been searching around fo a loooong time to find this info quick and easy.
THANKS!!!!!

Thanks for writing this guide so more people can know about Exact Audio Copy, but the drive settings need more clarification and revision. HQShare (http://www.hqshare.net/showthread.php?t=931) and Hydrogen Audio (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EAC_Lossless_Backup), who both strive for audio fidelity, recommend disabling C2 error correction and enabling Accurate Stream and audio cache for a proper rip.

Thanks for writing this guide so more people can know about Exact Audio Copy, but the drive settings need more clarification and revision. HQShare (http://www.hqshare.net/showthread.php?t=931) and Hydrogen Audio (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EAC_Lossless_Backup), who both strive for audio fidelity, recommend disabling C2 error correction and enabling Accurate Stream and audio cache for a proper rip.

Thanks for the info. I’ll take a look at those articles and make the appropriate adjustments to my tutorial.

I hate to be so ignorant, but can you tell me how I can compare to a database how good my rip is versus a perfect CD?
btw, amazing tutorial!
very insightful!

I’m still looking for a way to rip on OS X….

Oops. I forgot to bump this thread. 🙂

The tutorial is now back online and with many new improvements (quick link (http://www.soniconthenet.org/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=2656&p=21211#p21211)).

(referring to the old tutorial) Thanks for writing this guide so more people can know about Exact Audio Copy, but the drive settings need more clarification and revision. HQShare (http://www.hqshare.net/showthread.php?t=931) and Hydrogen Audio (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EAC_Lossless_Backup), who both strive for audio fidelity, recommend disabling C2 error correction and enabling Accurate Stream and audio cache for a proper rip.

Hows it be tra GNIK. 🙂 I’ve done some research on this actually. The thing about C2 pointers is that although the drive reports that it can make use of this feature, many drives don’t report all of the C2 information, this can result in EAC falsely reporting an error when none actually exist, and this is most likely the reason as to why many tutorials say to disable the feature. However, there’s kind of a way to test this that doesn’t involve the really long process of DAE Quality (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/other-projects/dae-quality/).

In my current tutorial, I recommend that if EAC reports that a drive is capable of using this feature, that it should enabled but it must be used in conjunction with Test & Copy and in this way the user can still check for any errors that may have resulted due to inconsistencies produced by C2 and disable it based on the results and only after they’ve check two other possibilities for the error. If you’re wondering why enable this feature at all, it because it provides a speed increase when ripping the CD.

In regards to the Audio cache, I don’t see any reason why users should forcibly enable a feature if they’re drive doesn’t support it, especially too when the creator of the program recommends against using a drive that supports this feature if there’s choice. Having it enabled for drives that support it and disabled for drive that don’t won’t make any difference in EAC’s ability to accurately retrieve data from the disc, the only thing is that having it enabled will really slow down the ripping process.

I hate to be so ignorant, but can you tell me how I can compare to a database how good my rip is versus a perfect CD?
btw, amazing tutorial!
very insightful!

Hey Wheatie13. The short answer to your question, although really late (sorry), is Yes. 🙂 In my most recent tutorial, I show users how to configure Exact Audio Copy to use AccurateRip which is a service that will compare your rip, track by track, to rips stored in it’s own database. Check it out.

I’m still looking for a way to rip on OS X….

Well, I don’t know very much about this, but from what I’ve read you can run Exact Audio Copy on a Mac if you install VirtualPC (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx) or WineHQ (http://wiki.winehq.org/) for Mac Intel chipsets.

ealgheao i have a problem about embedding JPEG Album Art images onto FLAC and OGG Vorbis files. can anyone tel me what i need to do to have the art show on my my MP3 Player? cause i’ve tried MediaMonkey to do so but that never worked. can anyone…………….?

ealgheao i have a problem about embedding JPEG Album Art images onto FLAC and OGG Vorbis files. can anyone tel me what i need to do to have the art show on my my MP3 Player? cause i’ve tried MediaMonkey to do so but that never worked. can anyone…………….?

Hi TrueLugia121.

You can try Mp3Tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/).

This tutorial is great. Thank you for posting it.

"Lossless" is for fucking faggot-ass retards. Since recording equipment can’t record nearly as good as the human ear can hear, there’s no point in trying to have "lossless" ripping. If you want "lossless" then hire the band to play for you live.

Fucking retards. Why was this bullshittery stickied, anyway? Oh, right, so that way I could find it without surfing through 80 million posts and call out on the faggotry.

LOL
THis is what i’m trying to figure out rite now.
I have al the OSTs…but now wit hthese new threads and everything in "Lossless" should i take the time to dl them again?
It takes so long to get just ONE thing, do i really wanna do it for all 3 million of my OSTs?

Thank you very much for putting this tutorial up, it seems geared for total computer illiterates such as myself. There were a couple things I was curious about when reading.

First of all, it would seem that the end result of using this program is to make .wav files from cd audio tracks, correct? As far as I know .wavs are basically the ultimate in lossless computer file sound quality. If this is true, then couldn’t a person use nero or basically any legitimate sound recording software to do the same thing? The older version of nero I used to have did this perfectly. (The one I’m using now is a little glitchy/downloaded so only this function I can’t get to work). Also, I can’t really imagine imperfections coming up when ‘ripping’ (really just copying) audio files from a CD so I don’t see the need to use inspection software. Has my luck been too good?

More than this, however, I thought about the fact that all the files I’ve downloaded from members of this forum had the music in .mp3 format. Wav files are quite large, apparently on the software you demonstrated with 6 megs a minute, but when I make them it’s 10 megs a minute. Obviously files of this size are too unwieldy to put up on file hosting sites, so I thought it perfectly legitimate that people would convert them to mp3s for sharing purposes. Basically, I didn’t see anything in the tutorial that explains how to take these ‘lossless’ files and make them available here.

If these are the ignorant ramblings of a complete moron, then please forgive me. I discovered this community very recently and I really want to start putting up my music, which is all on CD, so I was happy that you were trying to explain the process simply.

Hi shimasterc.

I will gladly answer your questions, although, I do not have the time right now to go into any details, maybe Friday. What I can tell you now is that the reason why you’re getting such large files is because you may have skipped a part in the Configuration Wizard (first two pictures in the tutorial) which sets up the EAC program to encode your audio files into FLAC format instead of WAV, or you may not have used the "uncompressed" option instead of the "compressed" option under Action -> Test & Copy Selected Tracks / Test & Copy Image & Create CUE Sheet -> Compressed.

Click on image
(http://www.soniconthenet.org/viewtopic.php?p=21211#p21211)

Just so you audiophiles understand, in theory it is not likely that you will make a 1:1 copy (that is byte for byte) using standard drives. The reason being that Redbook Audio is raw PCM and contains no CRC data…so your drive doen’t know if the byte is right or wrong.

EAC’s Accurip has a database of common CDs that have been ripped w/ a known checksum, they could be wrong. That’s why it uses an external CRC instead of local like data cds do.

Redbook Audio is the only optical media format that does not have any CRC and relies on EFM encoding, TOC and Subchannel and blindly rips it…though some drives can detect errors better then others.

This is pretty useless info just correcting the 1:1 statment for PCM as it is not correct. I am not aware of any professional equipment that can do this either as there’s no CRC data.

"Lossless" is for fucking faggot-ass retards. Since recording equipment can’t record nearly as good as the human ear can hear, there’s no point in trying to have "lossless" ripping. If you want "lossless" then hire the band to play for you live.

Fucking retards. Why was this bullshittery stickied, anyway? Oh, right, so that way I could find it without surfing through 80 million posts and call out on the faggotry.

you sir are a poor example of poor moderating on this site.

mp3s are not lossless. converting from lossless to mp3 will reduce quality.

if i convert ape > flac or flac > ape, will quality be lost then?

Hopefully someone can help me out here.

Everytime I rip a CD with Exact Audio Copy V 0.95 beta 4 with CDRDAO-Burning, the tracks come out as wav files. And it takes forever (at least 2 hours) to upload these wave files onto a file sharing site (megaupload, mediafire, etc.), in which most cases the site Iam uploading them onto tells me they’re too big to even upload. Is there a way to convert these wav files into MP3 files?

Thank you very much.

go to settings and choose compression. from there you can select flac.

I would just like to add that a nicely encoded mp3 will sound just as good as lossless. If space is an issue for some then i recommend converting the lossless files or CDs using the LAME mp3 encoder with the settings VBR -V2. Dbpoweramp comes with this encoder so i recommend using this program for converting.

some lossless albums can be the same size as 320k mp3 album. the compression is alot better these days thanks to ape. the quality over a 320k mp3 and a lossless is like comparing 1080p to 720p movie. its not a huge margin, but its noticable and can be appreciated. i think perhaps on decent speakers and headphones the difference in fidelity, noise in the silence can heard.

once upon a time Plextor drives were a requirement. Now being made by PLDS one crap drive is as good as another

if i convert ape > flac or flac > ape, will quality be lost then?

no, never
the formula is like this:
Lossless -> lossless = lossless
lossy -> lossless = lossy

for easy converting use foobar2000 +it has tones of plugins

i for one i replaced winamp like 4 years ago and i will never need it

What a confusion! Someone like files ripped othres like MP3 file. Someone must organize this muss.

I always rip my CDs using ExactAudioCopy
and the tool preset is:

-m s -q 0 (for mp3 cbr 320 kb\s)

-8 -o "D:\Music\LossLess\CDImage.flac" -V %s (for lossles bitrate)

of course thee must be Lame.exe and FLAC.exe encoders installed on your PC

Just so you audiophiles understand, in theory it is not likely that you will make a 1:1 copy (that is byte for byte) using standard drives. The reason being that Redbook Audio is raw PCM and contains no CRC data…so your drive doen’t know if the byte is right or wrong.

EAC’s Accurip has a database of common CDs that have been ripped w/ a known checksum, they could be wrong. That’s why it uses an external CRC instead of local like data cds do.

Redbook Audio is the only optical media format that does not have any CRC and relies on EFM encoding, TOC and Subchannel and blindly rips it…though some drives can detect errors better then others.

This is pretty useless info just correcting the 1:1 statment for PCM as it is not correct. I am not aware of any professional equipment that can do this either as there’s no CRC data.

Well this may be one of the reasons why a wave comparison program is built-in to EAC. Instead of looking at CRCs or anything like that, it compares each and every sample to the source CD. Anyway, it’s worth further research I guess. Thanks for your comment. 🙂

once upon a time Plextor drives were a requirement. Now being made by PLDS one crap drive is as good as another

LOL. That’s probably true. My "crap drive" seems to work well enough to return complete AccurateRip results for most all of the CDs that I’ve ripped, except in the case where there are no AccurateRip results.

What a confusion! Someone like files ripped othres like MP3 file. Someone must organize this muss.

Well there are advantages and disadvantages to lossless encoding. The main advantage is that the original audio quality is retained. Also, lossless can be transcoded into any other format, such as mp3s.

I always rip my CDs using ExactAudioCopy
and the tool preset is:

-m s -q 0 (for mp3 cbr 320 kb\s)

-8 -o "D:\Music\LossLess\CDImage.flac" -V %s (for lossles bitrate)

of course thee must be Lame.exe and FLAC.exe encoders installed on your PC

I personally like to rip my CDs as disc images and encode in FLAC format. Then, if I ever need to make mp3s, I just use foobar2000 which will transcode FLAC into LAME v0 (mp3), separate the single file into individuals tracks, and retain the tag information all in just two clicks on the mouse. 🙂

thanks for the valuable information

Thanks for the tutorial.

Posted by ghost_fist (http://forums.ffshrine.org/member.php?u=328299)

thanks for the valuable information

ealgheao i have a problem about embedding JPEG Album Art images onto FLAC and OGG Vorbis files.

Do Not! you destroy the files, will never be as before, that’s bad for sharing since people will always check rips with accuraterip database, at least some will, like me

try foobar2000 and plugin foo_covers and you even have the option of interchangeable images at several seconds or already modded dr. death’s foobar

Now that I have a FLAC with the cue, how am I able to play each track separately?

Ok quick question here. I followed the tutorial and am able to rip correctly, but I’m having a problem with the tagging before ripping. The title comes out as artist/track title and I can’t figure out how to change it before I rip the disc. I can’t figure out how to get the artist out of the title an put it in the artist column.

NVM, I fixed everything manually in the cue -.- Man what a pain in the rear that was, I’m glad I wasn’t trying to fix something humongous lol.

Just wanted to say thanks for the tutorial. It helped me set up all the many options in EAC that had eluded me in the past.

I recently downloaded a lossless rip of a CD and the log listed

Used output format : User Defined Encoder
Selected bitrate : 128 kBit/s
Quality : High
Since it’s flac, I’m assuming it’s lossless quality, so what is the relevence of the 128 kBit/s?

Thanks for the guide, really helpful.

I’m having a weird problem with EAC, though.
Anytime the program would bring up a directory selection thing to choose where to have something save or copy to, the program crashes.
I’ve gotten around this by choosing the option to have things save to a specific directory. The problem is the default directory for this option is "C:" which is probably the worst place to save things ever, and due to the aforementioned crashing issue, can’t be changed.

If someone could help me resolve this issue, that would be great.

In case it matters, I’m using Windows 7 64-bit.

Please help. I asked a friend of mine to rip the Metal Gear Ultimate Sorter Soundtracks, which are really rare.
Because i dont’t have a clue how to rip CDs proper into lossless format, i tried to reach your link for the manual.
But i only get: "You are not authorised to read this forum." Is there another link to read the manual?

Thank you very much!

Please help. I asked a friend of mine to rip the Metal Gear Ultimate Sorter Soundtracks, which are really rare.
Because i dont’t have a clue how to rip CDs proper into lossless format, i tried to reach your link for the manual.
But i only get: "You are not authorised to read this forum." Is there another link to read the manual?

Thank you very much!

Wait a sec… You have the actual physical disc there?? That’s really cool!

Can someone help him out please?

Please help. I asked a friend of mine to rip the Metal Gear Ultimate Sorter Soundtracks, which are really rare.
Because i dont’t have a clue how to rip CDs proper into lossless format, i tried to reach your link for the manual.
But i only get: "You are not authorised to read this forum." Is there another link to read the manual?

Thank you very much!

I don’t use that guide but here’s another that i use that’s not on a forum

A Perfectionist’s Guide to Audio CD Extraction and Lossless Compression (http://www.lunetta.net/lossless/)

you can get the Flac encoder here

FLAC – download (http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html)

How can i convert FLAC to MP3? all of the programms that i tried let me only convert 1/2 of the map!

How can i convert FLAC to MP3? all of the programms that i tried let me only convert 1/2 of the map!
I use dbPoweramp. It’s very versatile and easy to use. A sturdy batch converter is also included.

Hi guys, I don’t find the EAC tutorial to make a CD-Audio 1:1 copy & rip to flac, the link is probably down.
Link please

regards

CyberSpark, YOUR LINKS ARE DEAD! :mad::notgood:
replace them with the link someone else provided.

A Perfectionist’s Guide to Audio CD Extraction and Lossless Compression (http://www.lunetta.net/lossless/)
:smrt:

People keep posting your thread as a reference.
I don’t think the people using your thread knows it doesn’t exist anymore.
It’s like retards just google and post the first links without even checking the content.

…are you still even alive? :eye:
Someone shoot him in the foot to check.

I want admin/mod powers to rectify this thread. 😡

This is a more user friendly (and updated) guide:

Thread 91868

If someone needs help, ask on the thread linked above!

Ukay

thx for the link

Thanks for spreading this great info. This is critical to achieving high quality rips.