I'll attempt one right here. I'm not trying to make this pretty, so it's basically going to be a wall of text with no pictures, but I assume we can all find our way around EAC :)
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EAC Settings
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1. The extraction tab.
Check "fill up missing offset samples with silence". This does what it says, and replaces samples lost due to your drive's offset with silence so the track length will remain the same, rather than becoming shorter. For example, if your drive has a +18 offset, you will lose 18 samples from the track. So, this option fills them back in. However, it does so with silence, so if there were non-silent audio samples in those 18 samples you lost, then it's that less lossless of a rip. To combat that, you'll need to have a drive that overreads into the lead-in and lead-out.
Check "synchronize between tracks". This basically prevents pops and gaps from occurring in between tracks. Sounds good (no pun intended).
Don't check the third box. This essentially achieves the opposite of the first box and makes sure the track isn't as long as it should be. Very lame.
The skip track boxes are there for if your disc is having errors, can't properly extract a track, and will take all day just to try and do so. You can check these if you want just to save you some time, just know when your drive has had an error.
The next two boxes are also optional. If you're worried about drive heat, check the first one, fiddle with the options. If you're worried about the drive opening during extraction, check the second one (I actually have this checked and it saved me once since I accidentally flicked the drive button while near my computer).
Extraction priority can be whatever you want, I use High. Error recovery quality should be High, just to give it the best chance it can get.
2. The general tab.
The only required box on this tab is the third box "on unknown CDs," which you are required to turn OFF. Yes, that's right, I said off. All this box does is adds CD-Text to CDs that don't have it and changes the CD-Text on CDs that do have it. CD-Text is data about the CD just like any other subchannel code is, like pregaps, and goes into your CUE sheet accordingly. Adding it or changing it is not acceptable. Uncheck this box.
I also think it's good to check the fourth box, "display times using frames". Frames are more accurate then seconds because they are the CD's native interval of time; seconds can't be exactly calculated from frames and have to be rounded to. It won't affect the quality of anything though.
3. The tools tab.
This tab is much more important. To start, you always want to have the first tab checked. It adds subchannel code to your CUE sheet, which is quite literally what your CUE sheet is for: to contain all the data of a CD that isn't the audio (indexes, pregaps, catalogs, ISRCs, CD-Text). Always have this box checked. Some drives don't retrieve this data properly and that's a shame, but at least we'll still know that the data's there.
The "use CD-Text information in CUE sheet generation" tab is going to be one of the trickier tabs, and goes hand-in-hand with the box we turned off in the "general" tab. This tab will usually be turned off, but you have to know when to turn it on. If you put a CD in your drive and it has it's own CD-Text, then you will turn this option on for the usage of that CD. Otherwise, you have it turned off.
The third option is optional. Personally, I can't stand those fucking things and delete them on sight, but generate them if you like.
Check the fourth and fifth boxes. One writes the LOG file we all know and love, and the other appends a checksum that can be verified with a tool that comes with EAC, so we know it hasn't been edited. Very good things right here.
Everything else is optional (except the last box actually :D).
4. The normalize tab.
Keep the box unchecked, period. Normalizing changes the volume of the audio file. Did we say "changes"? Not lossless. Not good.
5. Just kidding! There is no number 5 for this section. That's right, all the other tabs are optional. Well actually, the "interface" tab should be set so that you use a Windows interface unless... you know some reason you shouldn't o_O
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Drive Settings
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1. The extraction method tab.
Obviously, you want to be in Secure Mode.
Enable Accurate Stream.
Whether or not you should disable your cache depends on the drive you're using. Though I actually don't need to, I disable my cache for two reasons: because it can only yield positive results, and so people can't find anything wrong with the rip. It's good to disable it, but if you know you don't need to (if you know), then it's perfectly fine not to.
As for C2 errors, a few drives support them, and if you know your drive does and think it will help you with a scratched disc or something, then enable them. But usually, you'll have this turned off.
2. The drive tab.
Not much to do here. With a CD in the drive, you can detect your drive's read command. The read command can really help with extraction speed. Don't select one yourself unless you really know what you're doing.
The next three boxes should be unchecked, unless you know you need to use them for some reason (not usually the case).
At the bottom, check the CD-Text read capable drive box in hopes that your drive can read CD-Text. It's an important part of getting an as-close-to-perfect rip as possible. I think many drives can read CD-Text, but it's kind of tough testing this out because there's not exactly a list of CDs with CD-Text on them, so you just kind of have to hope it works.
3. The offset / speed tab.
To start, DO NOT USE ACCURATERIP WITH YOUR DRIVE. This will force you to use an offset that is +30 from what you should use.
The default offset you should use is -30 from what Accuraterip says. So, +30 becomes 0, +6 becomes -24, etc. That is what you should put for starters in your offset box.
If your drive can overread into the lead-in and lead-out, then definitely check that box. That's an important part in catching every sample. If your drive can't do it; you may not miss samples, but you may, which would be a shame.
Use "current" speed.
Allow speed reduction during extraction.
4. The gap detection tab.
Your gap/index retrieval method should be set to Method A / Secure. If your drive can't use this method for some reason, choose Method B or Method C, but try to keep it on secure.
5. The writer tab.
I won't go into this, since I think the idea is to rip CDs, not burn them.
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The Ripping Process
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1. Put the CD in your drive!
2. Notice whether or not there is CD-Text - that is, whether or not information about the tracks comes up in the editor. If it's all just Track01, Track02 with Unknown Artist and Unknown Album, then you keep the "use CD-Text information in CUE sheet generation" option in the "tools" tab unchecked. If information does come up, then go and check that box.
3. Press F4 to detect the pregaps.
4. In the "action" menu, select the method you'd like to rip with. Typically, this will be test & copy, with or without any lossless compression format you might have chosen (FLAC, APE, etc). I'm not going to help you set up a compression format with EAC because I don't use one with EAC! I rip to WAV and then compress outside of EAC with FLAC, APE, or whatever I'm using. Personal choice, you do what you want. You can also rip to a range, there's nothing wrong with that (however it makes retrieving a whole HTOA kind of tricky and just really not worth it, but that's only for CDs with an HTOA which are extremely few).
5. Now that we've ripped the music, create the CUE sheet, done via the "action" menu again. You probably want the second-to-last option in the "action" menu checked, "append gaps to previous track (default)", if it isn't already. Then you can just create the CUE sheet with the "current gap settings..." option in the "create CUE sheet" submenu. Of course, you can use prepended gaps and it won't affect how lossless your rip is (actually they make more sense then appended gaps), but many people don't like them. The thing with appended gaps is that, if a CD has a "hidden track" in between tracks, in a pregap (usually a short 30 second - 1 minute intro of sorts), appending the gaps will cause the intro of one track to actually be the ending of another track, so that track will end very strangely and the other track won't begin like it should. However all the audio data is still there and in contiguous order, so it's still a lossless method of handling gaps.
6. Remove the REM DISCID and REM COMMENT crap that EAC adds to the CUE sheets. It's really stupid and doesn't belong on the CUE sheet because it's not part of the CD. Do you think there is a reference to ExactAudioCopy v1.0b3 on a CD, especially one created 20 years before EAC was even created? No, nor is the DISCID stored somewhere on the CD. The DISCID was made up by CDDB as a method of identifying discs, it's not part of a CD.
7. Don't be afraid to change filenames how you like. There's no such thing as a "filename" on a CD, only indexes, and as long as you don't change those, you're good. Make sure to change the filenames in the CUE sheet accordingly, and use the right extension! CUE sheets default to WAV, and there's nothing more annoying than pointing to a bunch of WAV files that don't exists because they are actually FLAC files.
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Special Methods
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1. Want to know when it's appropriate to change your offset? This required quite a bit of extra work and some technical know-how. It also requires a drive that can overread into lead-in and lead-out. If you don't have a drive like this, then this will be a total waste of your time. This is also only for people that care about retrieving every sample from the CD (that is, they don't want to lose samples because they want lossless ;)).
To start, rip the first and last track of the CD with your drive's normal offset (again, this is -30 from the Accuraterip/EAC offset). These need to be WAV files, so they can be worked with. Then, with a tool like silrem (
http://www.noisetime.com/silrem.html), check to see if there is silence at the beginning of the first track and at the end of the last track. If there is silence at the beginning of the first track, then we haven't missed any non-silent samples at the beginning of the CD, and same goes with the end of the CD if the last track has silent samples at the end of the rip. However, if you have non-silent samples all the way to the end of a CD, then you will need to extend your drive's offset to the point where you catch the last sample.
To test for this in silrem, it's pretty simple. First of all, move the tracks to the silrem folder. Then open the program, go to the "output" tab and make sure the third box from the bottom, "create files even if nothing changed", is unchecked. It should be by default. You should also set up a subfolder to output the files to using the box titled "subfolder" to the right of the "source folder with" option. Just call it "new" or something.
In the "processing" tab, uncheck the "link silence removal of beginning and end" box. Stupidest option I've ever seen, and it makes our task impossible. Now, uncheck the box to remove silence at the end, and keep the box to remove silence from the beginning checked. Make sure that the threshold is "-inf (digital zero)". This will make the program look only for true silent samples, which are 00s in a WAV file.
Now, in the "input" tab, click the "Add..." button in the bottom-left corner and add the first track. Then just click the "process" button in the top-right corner. If it creates a new file, you're good and don't need to worry about the beginning of the CD. Now go back to the "processing" tab, uncheck the option to remove silence from the beginning and check the option to remove silence from the end, again at -inf. Now go back to the "input" tab, select the last track, and process. If it creates a new file: great news! You don't need to change your drive's offset. You're good to go with your default offset, all the samples on the CD will be caught. Of course, let's say it doesn't create a new track for the beginning or end. Okay, now you have to get really tricky...
To start, you will need to re-rip the track that wasn't affected by silrem (let me say here that if neither track was affected, then you're screwed and this is a CD that you cannot retrieve every sample from). Go back into EAC, and this time, set your offset to 100 less or more than your default offset: if you're doing the beginning track, subtract 100; if you're doing the end track, add 100. Now rip the track and open the resulting WAV in an waveform viewer. I use Sound Forge 7.0 (don't hate, I'm too lazy to update); you can use anything that doesn't do any strange interpolation of the waveform, and just shows it to you in its normal form. I can't comment on any waveform viewers that do interpolation nor could I tell you how to disable it, because I've only used Sound Forge. If there is a high demand for it, I can test some free waveform viewers out.
Anyway, open the new track in the waveform viewer program and zoom the waveform in as high as you can. The peaks should spike up really high and should basically just be gigantic blocks until the end, where it will die down. Go all the way to the end of the file. There will be some samples where there are no peaks. Moving left of that, you will eventually see some peaks again. You need to count how many silent samples there are, which is possible usually by just clicking at the end of the non-silent samples, holding shift, and hitting end; the program should tell you in how many samples your selection is. You need to take this number and modify your +/-100 offset with it; + if you're doing the beginning track, and - if you're doing the end track. So, say my drive's offset has a 0. Oh noes, there's non-silent samples at the end of the CD. So, I rip with +100. I figure out "okay, now there's 56 silent samples at the end of the track." So, 100-56=44. So, I need to rip this disc with a +44 offset to catch everything (p.s. I've found about 6 discs now that have needed +44 so this example is not coming out of my ass).
Sorry if that is confusing to you, but right now it's the best I can do. I've been writing this thing for almost 2 hours, lol. If people want me to improve it, I'll try to improve it later.
2. Does your CD have a HTOA, meaning there's a hidden track before track 1? There's a special way to rip these, rather than just using the typical EAC commands. To do it, you can't be afraid to enter the Windows registry and manually change some values. You also, again, need a drive that can overread into lead-in and lead-out. You also kind of need a drive whose offset isn't negative (though this isn't as important).
Hit the "start" button in Windows and click on "Run..." (sorry if these directions aren't exact for your version of Windows, I'm on XP, but I think you know what I mean). Type "regedit" without the quotes and press Enter or hit OK. The Registry Editor should open. It may be something weird like "regedt32" if "regedit" doesn't work.
In the Registry Editor, Hit Ctrl+F and search for "CDTextCapable" without the quotes. It should take you to a place where EAC has stored the settings for any drive you have ever configured/used with EAC. This should be in HKEY_CURRENT_USER, not HKEY_USERS. HKEY_CURRENT_USER should be the first result anyway though.
Alright, in the left side column, find the drive that you're currently using. For example I have three: TSSTcorpCD/DVDW TS-H552L 0614, IDE-DVD DROM6216 HD08 and PLEXTOR DVDR PX-716A 1.11. The PLEXTOR is the drive I currently use, so I'll click on that. Now, in the right panel, we have a column of different keys we can change. Find the one called SampleOffset and double-click on it. We're going to change it so that it equals -44100, plus whatever your drive's default offset is. So, for example, my default offset for the Plextor is 0, so I'll just use -44100. However, if your drive's offset was +18, you'd use -44082. However, changing a value into a negative using hex is a little tricky, so we have to enlist the aide of our good friend Calculator.
Open Calculator and make sure you're in Scientific/Programmer/whatever they call it mode so that you can use hex values. Hit the - button, then 44100, then hit =. This will change it into -44100. Add your offset to this. Now hit the hex button to convert this to hex. You will get a really long string of Fs with a few different letters/numbers at the end. For the Plextor (0 offset), I get FFFFFFFFFFFF53BC. Now you need to know what to do with those results.
Since there are This particular value likes to eat its hard-boiled eggs from the little end first, so it's in Little Endian notation. This means that the least significant value goes first (the smallest end of the egg). Since the SampleOffset key is asking for 8 digits, take the last 8 digits of the number calculator gave you. In my case, that's FFFF53BC. Now reverse the order of every pair of bytes. So,
FF FF 53 BC
becomes
BC 53 FF FF
You will do the same with your number, and that is what you will enter into the SampleOffset key in Registry Editor. Make sure to highlight all the values currently there and replace them; don't add more. You should have 2 pairs of 4 values when you're done, 8 in total.
Now close Registry Editor (you may wish to save that key into your favorites first so it's easy to get to later) and open EAC. Go to the drive options and check the "offset / speed" tab. Your offset should be at -44100! The reason we have to do this is because EAC is stupid and won't let us change stuff past 11760 samples in either direction, plus or minus. So, we have to force EAC to accept such a high offset. Don't worry, EAC can still use the offset correctly, it just doesn't like to accept it.
Now you can detect gaps and rip the hidden track using the "copy selected tracks index-based" method in EAC's action menu. If you get an error from EAC about your filename construct, you need to add %tracknr2% to your naming scheme in the EAC Options filename tab. After the 01.00 index rips, you can cancel the operation, since it will just go through the whole CD like that, and that's not how you want to rip a CD (it is the only way to rip a HTOA though).
I'll mention now that while I had original said -88200 in my post and pio2000 said it in his post, when I use -88200, I just get a bunch of ripping errors. -44100 extracts the track successfully without any errors and without missing any data (at least for the CD I'm testing with, which is disc 3 of the SaGa Frontier Original Sound Track). My bad on the error before.
And there is my guide to ripping. If you have anything to add/correct/bitch about... what are forums for!
I'll also comment on a few bits of your guide:
-CD-TEXT: I would not write it to a cue sheet at all, because you can't get all CD-TEXT fields by doing so, as a cue can't store binary fields (such as GENRE). Instead, create .cdt files (I do that with CDRWin) and link to them using the CDTEXTFILE command in the cue file. It's easier and nicer too (imo) and you can't really do anything wrong that way, just completely forgetting to extract or to link it.
-Offset: Let me just mention here that Truong over at redump.org found yet another "correct" offset over a year ago, which is -18 (when Carlos' is 0 and Andre's is +30). It's in their private dumpers forum so I can't link it, but they've probably spoken about it elsewhere as well (as there are quotes from Carlos discussing with Truong). Also, personally I think using EAC's offset is perfectly fine, at least as long as there's no absolute proof for a true reference offset (and, as we know, even discs or pressing plants probably have offsets, so one might argue if something like this even exists or matters). Dismissing verification databases like accuraterip and ctdb just because of this is stupid imo. You can always correct your offset afterwards if you made sure to get every single sample of audio data while ripping anyway (and yes, naturally this includes your other methods). Of course, you could also rip using Carlos' or Truong's value and only offset to Andre's for verification post ripping.
-REM DISCID. You're basically right about this (and I would and did actually think so too), but for verification with CUETools, I'd rather advise to keep it, see CUETools Wiki (
http://www.cuetools.net/wiki/CUETools#What.27s_wrong_if_i.27m_sure_the_CD_is_pr esent_in_the_database.2C_but_CUETools_doesn.27t_fi nd_it). Yes, this shouldn't apply if your rip is complete, but it doesn't do any harm either, as remarks are just that and get ignored when recreating a disc. I can see it coming in handy when a rip gets butchered by some people before redistributing it.
-HTOA. Isn't the whole registry editing just for getting the "pregap of the audio-session"? Meaning that should there be nonsilent samples at the beginning of the first track, first rip the "gap of the first track" (using Pio's terms here to avoid confusion) by prepending gaps, ripping by range or ripping an image (which is much easier), check this gap for nonsilent samples at the beginning, and only if you encounter actual audio there, start editing the registry and get those two seconds (or just anything until silence). Personally I rip the "gap of the first track" (if present) regardless if there's audio or not, but that's another story.
But after rereading what I wrote I actually think you were talking about those two seconds from the start, it just didn't really sound like it in your guide for me. Adjusting the offset by so little samples wouldn't get you an actual HTOA at all since they're much longer.
Anyway, there really should be a good, comprehensive up-to-date DAE guide people can link to, similar to xuncat's. I'd happily give input and help where I could, but don't see me doing much about hosting or designing it (in whatever form it may appear).
