Configuration and Ripping

If you open the EAC Options panel by pressing F9 or by clicking the option from the EAC menu, you will see lots of options. Most of them are self-explanatory but just a few are important and I feel the need to explain them.

In the Extraction tab, at the bottom left corner there is a combo box called Error recovery quality. This tells EAC how much to insist on a specific region of the disc trying to recover data, if the disc is damaged or scratched there. Usually, the default option is good, set it to High only if you have a very scratched disc.

In the Filename tab, you can set a pattern that EAC would use to save the files. For example, you can use "%N. %A - %T" to save files like this: "1. Artist - Title".

That's about it with this configuration panel, there is another one called Compression Options that can be accessed by pressing F11 or by clicking the option with the same name in the EAC menu.

If you have selected to use the LAME MP3 Encoder, you can see its settings in the tab called External Compression. The codec is already configured to create top quality mp3 files with variable bitrate, averaging at about 192 kbps. This is the CD quality preset, not the 128 kbps we were used for so long. If you want more quality, you can increase the bitrate, 256 is enough even for picky people and 320 often cause no noticeable differences.

In case you wish to encode the files using other codecs that may already be installed on your computer, you will have to uncheck the option Use external program for compression in this tab, go to the Waveform tab, select from the first combo list the codec you wish to use and then, from the second combo the quality level or any other option that codec may have.

From this point the configuration of EAC is complete, close the panel if it's still open.

If you have more than one unit, select the one you wish to use from the combo box in the left area of the main window, insert the audio CD, select the audio tracks you wish to store on your computer. Now we are ready to rip the files.

Click on the second button on the left, the one that has MP3 written on it, to rip the tracks and encode them using the external compression program we specified (LAME MP3 encoder) or click on the first button - the one that says WAV - to save the tracks in the standard basic WAV format.

In the first case, as soon as each audio track is ripped, the ripper starts the LAME MP3 encoder and waits for him to finish. If we wish to encode the tracks in lossless format, we are not really concerned with space, therefore it's better to rip the whole disc without pauses and then use the utilities that come with the lossless encoders to encode the audio tracks.

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