After working on it for several weeks, I finally finished my guide for audiophile-quality extraction of music from CDs. To get the best possible audio quality, it is necessary to have bit-perfect extraction from the CD (with no unnecessary error correction trying to reconstruct misreads due to CD drive offset). Then, the perfectly-extracted audio should be compressed using a lossless format to maintain the original quality. The guide shows how to use setup and use some free programs to do this: EAC, FLAC, and AccurateRip.

To be honest, I’m not positive I could identify the difference between a “regular” extraction and a bit-perfect extraction, and maybe not even between an extremely high-quality compressed file and a lossless file. There would have to be a lot of back-to-back comparisons. However, I like to put the extra effort into projects to make sure they are done “right”. Configuring this software and getting it all to work together was not exactly intuitive, so I put together the guide to help others interested in using this process. Let me know what you think!