Installing EAC (I)

You probably wonder why I have chosen this particular CD ripper software when there are lots of other tools available and all should do the same thing, create a perfect copy of audio tracks on your hard drive.

Well, in most cases, it's not that simple.

Audio tracks are not stored on an audio CD like regular files. Their format is very basic, just enough for a regular CD player to understand where a track starts and where it ends. You need an application that can scan the disc and copy the contents of a track in a standard format your computer can understand. Because of this basic format the music is stored on an audio CD, there is just a very weak error correction on the disc.

If a CD is dirty or scratched, stand-alone CD players and regular CD rippers try to correct the erroneous information as much as possible but if they're not able to fix it in a short amount of time, they usually skip it, thus resulting a clicking or popping sound.

EAC is the only CD ripper at this moment that has a special ripping mode called secure mode. In this mode, if a scratch or a problem is detected on the disc, EAC will go back again and again, even for hours if needed and allowed, inspecting the surface of the disc and trying to reproduce as accurately as possible the audio tracks onto the hard drive.

A fast CD ripper usually makes one single pass over the surface, obtaining the audio content and saving it on your drive, it uses almost no error checking during transfer, that is why it is very fast. But being fast does not mean good in this case, we are more concerned about audio fidelity.

You can download EAC from the download section of their site, any version is good, even if it's beta. Download the zip package, extract the whole content of the archive in a folder, I recommend C:\EAC.

As soon as you start Eac.exe from the location where you have extracted the files, you will be greeted with a wizard:

Click Next. In the next screen, the wizard will show you the units it is able to detect and allow you to check which ones you would like to use with the application:

As you see from the picture above, I have to units available, and I wish EAC to configure both of them automatically. For each unit, you will see at first the following image :

and after you click Next, it will either ask you to confirm the results :

or it will ask you to insert an audio CD in the unknown unit and test it:

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