Make Perfect Rips of Your CDs

YOU’LL NEED THIS

AN OPTICAL DRIVE Most drives should work just

fine—USB or internal. SEVERAL AUDIO CDS You need multiples to validate

your drive’s intricacies. EXACT AUDIO COPY From www.exactaudiocopy.de.

OK, GRANDPA, it’s time to trash that dusty old CD collection, or at least consign it permanently to a box in the garage, by shifting it all to a purely digital format. But if you’re going to go through your whole collection, it pays to do it right the first time, and that means ripping to a lossless format in a way that accurately replicates your discs. Once it’s there, you can do as you like with it; had you filled a hard drive with 128Kb/s MP3 files, you’d inevitably have to go through the whole task all over again later on.

Our format: FLAC. Not only because it’s lossless and doesn’t introduce any compression artefacts, but because a same-res rip is up to half the size of the PCM WAV files that raw CDs carry. We’ll use Exact Audio Copy, which can both rip to FLAC and generate the relevant CUE files to perfectly duplicate a CD. It can also compare your rips against a database of known good rips, to ensure your captured sounds are 100 percent sound. Note that ripping CDs is neither explicitly allowed nor disallowed by 1947’s copyright-defining Title 17 (funnily enough), but if you keep them to yourself, you should be OK.

1 INSTALL IT Download Exact Audio Copy from www.exactaudiocopy.de (making sure to choose the English-language version, rather than the German default), and run the installer. Click through until you’re able to select which components to install, and deselect “GD3” [ Image A], unless you’re OK with paying $8 for track information that you can get for free from the other two services already built in to EAC. Finish clicking through the installer, then run EAC when prompted. 2 WIZARDING WORLD There’s a wizard to get through now, but it’s a good one—it sets EAC up just about perfectly. First up: configuring your optical devices. If you have more than one drive, you can select which one to use for ripping, although we recommend allowing EAC to configure both at this point. Different drives have different characteristics, and one may turn out to be better than the other in terms of stability and accuracy—given that an ultra-accurate rip is our goal, the better your drive the better.

>> But wait: Configuring your drive involves inserting a disc, and when you do, you’ll likely be interrupted by an alert [ Image B] to set up AccurateRip. This service calculates the specific offsets of your drive’s laser, in order to compare the precision of your rips with others online. This part’s a bit finicky—it asked us for three subsequent “key discs” after the original, and summarily rejected anything that may have been pressed more than once. So, you might need to search the more obscure corners of your collection to satisfy AccurateRip. It’s not essential, but it’s worth doing. 3 FURTHER CONFIGURATION With AccurateRip out of the way, EAC’s own drive inspection can complete. Don’t panic if it looks as though EAC has crashed at this point. It probably hasn’t; give it a couple of minutes to complete. If it’s still spinning its wheels after that, you have permission to panic. When the results arrive, ideally you’re looking for caching to be a “no,” accurate ripping to be a “yes,” and C2 error information as “yes”—if these prerequisites aren’t met, you can still rip, but your digital copies might not be as accurate as they could be. Continue on through the wizard, and select FLAC when given the option of ripping formats, insert an email address (literally any email address will do, it doesn’t have to be valid) to link EAC to the Freedb track metadata service, and set your track naming scheme. Leave EAC in beginner mode for now.

4 TEST IT OUT Before we rip our first disc, there’s a small amount of additional configuration to do. Hop up to “EAC > Compression Options,” and open the “External Compressor” tab. FLAC should be set up by default; hit the “Test Compressor” button to ensure the FLAC encoder is properly installed and working, and to automatically set the appropriate value in the bitrate box. Note that this won’t affect your eventual rips, because they’ll exactly match CD resolution. Next, head to www.pastebin.com/ EVHsFtWm and paste the parameters we’ve squirreled there into the “Additional command line options” box, to ensure that every file is tagged properly with as much information as possible. 5 LET HER RIP Time to actually turn a CD into some FLAC files. Drop a target disc into your drive, head back to the main interface, and check the button on the top bar that looks like a CD with a red plus button next to it. Click the drop-down button next to it, and you’ll be able to select your metadata provider from one of two Freedb sources (realistically, there’s nothing between them) and CueTools DB. Select the latter for now, and click the button to drag in a bunch of information about your disc, including the cover. If it’s been released a number of times, you’ll want to select your specific version here [ Image C]. When your track information has populated, click the “CMP” button on the left of the interface to start ripping your FLAC compressed files. 6 CHECK, CHECK There’s not much you can do but watch the bars while the ripping process completes [ Image D]. Don’t be concerned by the mention of .wav files at the top of the ripping window, because EAC pulls these down first before converting them to FLAC, and it does away with them afterward. When everything’s complete, you’re shown your results, first from AccurateRip (if you’ve made it though the arduous testing process), and then from CueTools DB. Here you can discover just how well your rips landed, and find out about any dropped frames or errors encountered during the process. And that’s it, although if you’re concerned about the discs more than the tracks on them, you may wish to try using the “CUE” button on the left of the interface to generate a single massive .wav file with an associated .cue that exactly replicates the contents and track spacing of the original CD.