EAC Drive Options
EAC is the most powerful and advanced ripper available, it delivers the highest quality rips possible and unsurprisingly is the most popular ripping software at Hydrogenaudio. There's one catch, configuring it correctly is a newbie's nightmare. This guide will take you through all necessary steps of the configuration, so you will be able to enjoy high quality compressed audio no matter how advanced you are.
Software Needed
To begin with, download EAC and unzip it to a folder of your choice.
Note: This tutorial assumes you are installing EAC for the first time, i.e. that the default settings are set to start with. If this is not the case, you can reset them by doing the following:
- Press <Windows Key> + <R> (or click 'Start | Run'), type regedit, and hit <Enter>.
- Go to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\AWSoftware\EAC, and delete it by pressing Del.
EAC Configuration Wizard
- Upon running EAC for the first time, a setup wizard will appear. Close it by clicking Cancel, and close and restart EAC.
- Important: We have to do this to circumvent a bug in EAC which makes the program configure your reading devices (CD-ROM/DVD/CD-RW drives) incorrectly when it is first run.
- After restarting, re-run the config wizard by clicking EAC -> Configuration Wizard. Keep a clean Audio CD handy, you'll need it in a minute to test and configure your drives.
- Click Next; EAC will now list all CD drives it found in your system (all of them should be checked). Click Next again.
- You will now be asked what read mode to use for the drive. Be sure to enable I prefer to have accurate results:
- Click Next again. On the next page, click I don't trust these values, detect the features for my drive.
- Now, insert an Audio CD (Original, factory-pressed CD only. No CD-Rs,CD-RWs or bootlegs.) into your drive (if you have more than one, you will see in the window which one to use), and click Next twice. EAC will now perform some tests in order to determine your drive's capabilities, and display the results within a few minutes.
- If this is the case, click Next again. If you have more than one drive, the same procedure must now be repated for the other drives; once all drives have been tested, a summary like this will be displayed:
- Don't rely on this. This is purely a feature-based ranking (mainly dependant on the Audio Caching feature which is an obstacle for secure audio extraction) - it provides no assessment of the drives' actual ripping quality (in this example, EAC is completely wrong - the NEC drive is totally unreliable for audio extraction, while the Lite-On is excellent). You will have to test this for yourself later.
- Now, click Next again. EAC will now ask you whether or not you would like to configure the LAME encoder - uncheck the appropriate option, and proceed to the next page:
- You will now be asked for your e-mail address in order to access the freedb online music database. You needn't enter your real one, something like this will do:
- Click Next, and select I am an expert, let me use the full potential of EAC on the next page:
- Don't worry about it if you're not an expert ;-) - this tutorial explains all important options. Also, when run in Beginner Mode, EAC resets some settings that are important to us.
- Click Finish now to close the wizard.
EAC Options
Check out the EAC options in the EAC menu. While there isn't necessarily much you should change, it is important that you set error recovery quality to "high". Notice that the below Coaster Factory tutorials are for EAC 0.9 Prebeta9, so don't take everything as a fact. Once you have configured EAC options as per the Coaster Factory tutorials, continue reading this article and configure the drive and encoder carefully.
Coaster Factory (CONFIGURING EAC OPTIONS)
CD-ROM Drive Options
For perfect rips, you should setup your CD-ROM drive correctly (secure mode options, offset correction options, gap detection options). Go to the drive options in EAC menu and follow these instructions:
Drive Setup (done once):
Select: Secure mode with the following drive features (recommended)
You will need to detect & apply drive features when using secure mode but only if you chose not to use the configuration wizard otherwise you can skip drive setup. Beware that these features are unique to every CD-ROM drive
Drive Features
- Caching/Drive caches audio
- If EAC reports "Caching: Yes" your drive caches audio data, every sector read will be read from cache and is identical, this will increase the probability of errors & cause a speed decrease. EAC needs to clear the cache by overreading it, enable this by ticking the "drive caches audio" box.
- Tip: EAC may misinform about audio caching as an alternative you can use Feurio's audio caching test found in Feurio.exe\Ctrl+Alt+P\Test device\Cache test.
- Tip: Some drives disable audio caching at low speeds, if your drive is set to DMA transfer mode try changing it to PIO only transfer mode then re-test for caching.
- Tip: If you are not sure whether your drive caches audio data or not (or if you don't want to use Feurio's audio caching test), as a rule of thumb, enable this option. This might result in lower ripping speed, but the results will be far more accurate.
- Accurate Stream/Drive has ‘Accurate Stream’ feature
- If EAC reports "Accurate Stream: Yes" your drive doesn't jitter this will decrease the probability of errors & cause a speed increase, enable this option by ticking the "Accurate Stream" box.
- C2 Error Info/Drive is capable of retrieving C2 error information
- With C2 enabled EAC's error detection becomes dependent on the drives C2 accuracy which varies from drive to drive & increases the probability of errors, this feature also results in a speed increase because EAC doesn't read the data twice anymore, If your drive supports this feature & you decide to use it enable this by ticking C2 Error Info box.
- Tip: To determine your drives C2 accuracy you could attempt creating a DAE Quality test CD. This takes a long time though. If you are not completely sure your drive supports C2 correctly you should disable this feature in EAC.
- Tip: If you are not sure whether your drive is capable of handling C2 error information, as a rule of thumb, disable this option. Once again, this might result in lower ripping speed, but the results will be far more accurate.
So an ideal drive would support accurate stream (tick) & wouldn't cache audio (no tick). However, there is no need to spend a fortune on buying a new drive. EAC works well with almost any decent drive available in the market to give you near-perfect results; provided EAC is configured properly as per instructions given above.