Overview:
This page describes the most accurate way I know to extract and preserve the data from an Audio CD (compact disc). Two steps are necessary to get the best possible audio quality:
- Bit-perfect audio extraction from the CD
- Lossless compression of the extracted audio
This 2-step process involves a lot of steps that most people would consider unnecessary. However, if you want to preserve and archive CDs by the most accurate means possible, this may be the page for you.
NOTE: If you are not an audiophile and just want to use a lossless format, you probably will not be able to tell the difference from the method I describe below. If this describes you, it is much easier to simply use a commercial music management program to extract / rip the songs to your computer using a lossless format. For this simplified method, possibilities include:
- Yahoo! Music Engine to extract the files to FLAC format. Can be played around your home by devices such as the Sonos Zone Player and the SlimDevices SlimBox2 and in your car by the PhatNoise PhatBox players.
- Windows Media Player (versions 9 or later) to extract files to the WMA Lossless format. Can be played by home devices such as Roku SoundBridge, Windows Media Center PC, and possibly Windows Media Extenders (untested).
- Apple iTunes to extract to Apple Lossless format. Can be played around your home by the Apple Airport Express and the Apple Airport Extreme.
However, none of the methods above guarantee bit-perfect extraction from the original CD. To get bit-perfect extraction and insure maximum fidelity, look to the methods outlined below.
Step 1: Choosing a Lossless Audio Format (codec)
There are multiple lossless codecs from which to choose, including FLAC, WMA Lossless, Apple Lossless, Shorten (SHN), Real lossless, Monkey’s Audio, OptimFrog, WavePack, etc. For a detailed comparison of lossless formats, check out the HydrogenAudio Lossless Comparison page. I highly recommend the free, open-source FLAC codec as it is widely supported, freely implemented, and full-featured. There is no reason for any device manufacturer to not support FLAC unless they are trying to push their own format. FLAC is the format used for these instructions.
Step 2: What You Will Need
Programs on your computer to Rip CDs:Exact Audio Copy – To rip CDs to the hard disk drive Accurate Rip – A plug-in that allows bit-perfect audio extraction FLAC Codec – To losslessly compress the extracted audio – Version 1.1.4 or later is required. Other Programs:Media Monkey – Plays FLAC, Edits Tags, Downloads cover art, converts between formats, great all-around program. Mp3tag – A great tag editor TagScanner – A great tag editor Album Cover Art Downloader – The best program for downloading coverart
FYI: Programs that will play FLAC-encoded music: Media Monkey Yahoo! Music Engine DB Power Amp Winamp with FLAC plugin Foobar2000 with fooFLAC plugin See a complete list on the FLAC website FYI: Audio hardware devices that support FLAC:Sonos Music System PhatNoise PhatBox Auto/Home systems SlimDevices SqueezeBox See a complete list on the FLAC website
Step 3: Install EAC, Accurate Rip, and FLAC
For EAC, I recommend downloading the latest beta release; all of the beta versions I’ve tried have been very stable. There are several variations of each release; I use the installer version that comes without CDRDAO. I use the default installation location (C:Program FilesExact Audio Copy) Installing AccurateRip is not as straight-forward. You will need to copy the file accuraterip.dll from the AccurateRip install directory (default is C:Program FilesIllustratedBpowerAMP) to EAC’s install folder (default is C:Program FilesExact Audio Copy) Installation is straight-forward for FLAC, I recommend the default installation directory location (C:Program FilesFLAC)
Step 4: Setup the CD Drive for Bit-Perfect Ripping
Go through the EAC Setup Wizard, use the settings shown below.
Use the detected settings:
Step 5: Configure Accurate Rip
Before using AccurateRip, it is necessary to determine the read offset for your CD / DVD drive. According the the AccurateRip website: every CD drive has a slight reading offset, this value tends to be fixed for each type of drive and is constant. If the drive does not support AccurateStream, (i.e. it has a varying offset each time a track is read) then AccurateRip cannot be used because it will never be able to configure itself. AccurateRip will find the drive offset by using keydiscs (a disc someone else has previously accurately ripped and added to the AccurateRip disc database). The key disc must have more than 5 tracks of a certain length. To configure AccurateRip, insert known keydiscs into your CD drive; a list of keydiscs is available on the AccurateRip Website. If the disc is recognized, AccurateRip will automatically offer to find the drive offset. Some discs listed in the keydisc database may be from a different pressing than the disc you test, so don’t give up if the first couple of key discs are not recognized.
When an offset has been found for a drive using the first keydisc, it has to match the offset already stored in the AccurateRip drive database. If it does not match, AccurateRip will require 3 keydiscs that give the same offset as the first keydisc.
Step 6: Configure EAC Program Options
EAC has a ton of configuration options, which is one of the reasons I’ve put this page together. Below is the setup that I’ve found that gives the best quality, most accurate ripping. However, you’ll probably want to change some of the options to suit your needs. Hint: To see what a specific option does, hover your mouse over the feature and a pop-up box describing the option will appear. Go to the EAC -> EAC Options. . . menu (or press F9) and make the following settings:
Do not use normalization! It will change modify the extracted audio. You will want to apply ReplayGain compensation instead, which is described later. 
For the track name, you can automatically create folders and sub-folders. The naming scheme below will give the following folder and song name: AlbumYear – Album NameTrack# – Song Name
Naming Scheme: %A%Y – %C%N – %T Various Artists: Various Artists%Y – %C%N – %T
I have it prompt me for the target directory each time, but you can just specify a default directory such as D:Music.
These really aren’t important for ripping.
If you are using WinXP / Win200 / Win2003 Server, the following setting should work fine. If you have problems, you may want to download the CDRDAO version of EAC or download the Ataptec ASPI interface. The EAC website can give you more information if you have troubles.
Step 7: Configure EAC Drive Options
Go to the EAC -> Drive Options. . . menu (or press F10) and make the following settings: Put a new CD in the drive and run the Detect Read Features test. Put a scratched CD in the drive and run the Examine C2 Feature test.
The Detect Read Features test:
The Examine C2 Feature test:
Autodetect the read command:
Experiment with the Overread into Lead-in and Lead-out feature if you get read errors at the beginning of the first track or end of the last track.
Use the default / detected Gap/Index retrieval method. I set Detection accurate method to Accurate; Secure and Inaccurate are the other options. Accurate and Secure both perform multiple reads, just Secure makes even more re-reads and this causes the ripping process take even longer. Use Secure on if you’re willing to take several hours or more to rip a slightly scratched disc.
Since this is for writing, the settings are not that important.
Step 8: Configure EAC Compression Options
Go to the EAC -> Compression Options. . . menu (or press F11) and make the following settings: The External Compression tab is the only one that needs to be configured; other tabs will be ignored. Set the command line and options as shown below:
For the Additional command line options, use the following. The -8 setting will give maximum compression. If you have a very slow computer, you may want to try -7 or -6. See this page for a complete list of FLAC command line options.
Step 9: Configure EAC freedb Optons
Go to the EAC -> freedb / Database Options. . . menu (or press F12) and make the following settings: These settings were probably already entered during the setup wizard, but just in case:
Step 10: Rip the Music to your PC
You are now ready to rip CDs to FLAC files! Just click the MP3 button to rip to a compressed file. This will not result in an MP3 being created; the MP3 button should really be called “the external file compression program” button. After making the configuration changes above, clicking the mp3 button will result in a FLAC file being created.
Go to the Database menu and select Send AccurateRip Results…. Make the following Scheduled Submission settings to add results to the AccurateRip disc database. This, in part, helps create more keydiscs.
Step 11: Edit the Tags
You’ll eventually find songs not taggeg properly when ripped and these are the best way to correct that. The tag editors are generally pretty straight-forward to use. The two best editors I’ve found are Mp3tag and TagScanner. These free programs can lookup tag info from the freedb database to retag files. They can also rename files based on the tags or retag songs based on the file name. Media Monkey is a great alternative, all-around app that can edit tags and do about everything else you’d want.
Step 12: Download the Cover Art
Many music players will display cover art. Album Cover Art Downloader is an app completely dedicated to getting the pictures into your music directories. This program can’t read the tags for FLAC/OGG files (only ID3 tags are recognized), but it can be configured to identify albums based on folder naming. Even with this setup, it still can get the album name wrong, so I have to manually delete the date before clicking “download covers”. Anyway, here is how I have Album Cover Art Downloader configured to identify albums based on folder/sub-folder naming.
Media Monkey is a great all-around program that does album art and also plays FLAC, Edits Tags, converts formats, etc. It will ready the tag info for about every format you can imagine, so it can be useful to modify any titles/folders that Album Cover Art Downloader doesn’t recognize.
Step 13: ReplayGain Volume Normalization
This is complicated enough for a separate explanation, so I won’t go into details here. ReplayGain will analyze and calculate the peak volume level for an entire album or each individual song and write a tag in the header of the file. It does not actually change the audio data within the file but rather give a “volume offset” that the audio player uses to pre-adjust the song to the proper playback level (independent of the player volume setting).
Links and References
This guide would not be possible without the information given in these excellent guides:
I have some old CDs with pre-emphasis. How do you deal with this issue?
So far I've been using Adobe Audition FFT filter with corners at 3180 and 10600 hz -10dB.
I'd really like to have an absolute indicator of the pre-emphasis bit status rather than comparing the original disc in an audio player vs the ripped audio in the computer – in other words, trusting my ears.
Thanks
After reading lots on the web about FLAC and then this article I still am left with one (possibly naive) question, that I want to ask before I embark.
Is there a solution (commercial or otherwise, Mac or Win) that automates this so that I can simply insert a disc, wait for the disc to be done and ejected and then insert another?
In between the program would perform an exact copy, encode to FLAC, encode a copy to mp3, tag it from CDDB, download cover art and put the FLAC and mp3 files into different but organized folders.
Yours Hopefully,
~>Bill
dbPowerAmp Music Converter has a CD Ripper component can rip to FLAC, tag the files, and download the cover art all at once. It costs about $30 for the non-freeware version, and it is well worth it my opinion.
I don't know that it can rip to FLAC and MP3 at the same time, but it can to a batch-convert of entire directory trees. So you can rip everything to FLAC and then do a batch convert and create the MP3s in a different directory. If you're converting to MP3 for compatibility with a portable device, dbPowerAmp has a program called Sveta Portable Audio that can do on-the-fly conversion from/to any format. So there would no reason to create the mp3s and store them — just create them on-the-fly when you sync your device.
Thanks Carlton, I'll definitely check it out. Late last night I also came across RipStation Micro. Have you ever heard of / used that?
Another thing that I thought of this morning truly puzzled me. I've read a number of threads on message boards about the "bit perfect" copy, and have come to an understanding that doing this is a non-trivial task, but how can this be?
If I make an analogy where instead of "songs" I use the word "documents" or "Photoshop files" then the idea of not getting a bit perfect copy seems absurd. If you can't get back exactly the bits you stored onto the disk then Word or Photoshop won't be able to read the file, and suddenly the CD becomes a pretty bad storage mechanism.
So what is it about the way that music is stored on a CD that makes getting back what the artist / label put down at all a challenge or issue? Why isn't bit perfect copying trivially easy? Just as getting the same word doc you burned to CD back without corruption is.
Best,
~>Bill
Bill, all optical drives are different, so they'll extract a different amount of data (the read offsets play a factor in this). In a perfect reality, everyone would use the same drive to extract audio data. That would ensure that they'd be getting as close as possible a copy of what they wanted with no noticed margin of difference.
The same can't be said for creating a document in Word/Photoshop. It's easier to replicate the same data there, so assuming the file is never altered, it could be replicated at the same size by anyone either from scratch or by numerous copy methods.
Thank you very much for this guide. I have had tag problems for two days and was on the verge of giving up on EAC, untill you made clear that 'MP3' stands for 'external etc.' NOW I can create my archiving project for all my Audio CD's.
Repay Gain is still sompewhat unclear, as you do not state where I can find this option in EAC, unless it is another program, or perhaps I should use EAC in playback mode first. I will find out. Meanwhile I am allready copying my CD's to a 1.5 Tb disk. It will take weeks, possibly months.
Thanks a mil. Would'nt have worked without you.
Kurt
Kurt, the ReplayGain calculated value created and added as a tag during Step 8. It's part of the FLAC command line for the encoder.
Dear Carlton, Thank you for your reply. The ReplayGain value had escaped my attention. So far I have archived 30 GB of audio. I have just come to "B", long way to go to "Z"…
I have added the ReplayGain in the Flac Command line just now. (B.t.w.: copying and pasting your command sample does not work as certain caracters turn out different at this end -Belgian keyboard-, that is why I 'adjusted' the command line allready present in EAC. This is how I missed the ReplayGain. Probably I was too scared initially to put it in, and then later, I could not make the link between the command and your little piece on 'ReplayGain'.)
Just so you know, perhaps you can make this fabulous piece of info even better yet, making it idiot proof. So that even people like me can pretend to be a pro.
I'm all set now and very grateful for your input.
Best wishes, Kurt