The Tools

EAC (Exact Audio Copy)

EAC is widely considered the best all round ripping software available today. (The process of retrieving the digital audio from your CDs is often referred to as ripping). Unfortunately, EAC is only available on the Windows series of operating systems. The reason why EAC is so well respected is due to it's ability to securely extract digital audio from CDs. Most DAE (digital audio extraction) softwares do what is called burst mode extraction, that is, the DAE software just reads the audio data without checking to see if it was correct. What EAC does differently is to read the audio twice and compare the results, if the results are identical you can safely^*1 assume the extraction was secure. Should the results not match EAC will try again to read the audio data to get a match. If EAC can't get a match it will report to the user the exact position of the error.

^*1This is dependent on a correctly configured EAC, which we will discuss later.

LAME

LAME is an MP3 encoder which is acknowledged in being able to produce the highest quality MP3s. To find more information about why this is the case see the Hydrogenaudio forums. Lots of testing is carried out here by it's users to ensure a quality MP3 encoder is recommended.

If you already have EAC installed or you've made some progress through this guide and have made a mistake and wish to start again, you can. Cancel the configuration wizard when it's suitable to do so. Go to the EAC menu at the top left hand corner (within EAC) and select configuration wizard.

Proceed to the page regarding the down-loading and installing of EAC And LAME