Exact Audio Copy(EAC for short) is a free software that can be used to extract tracks from an Audio CD to your computer's hard disk. What makes EAC special compared to other rippers is the fact that it is capable of reading audio CDs almost perfectly. EAC uses various methods for extracting audio data. EAC can also invoke externally installed encoders, thereby making it possible to simultaneously rip and encode audio data to the format of your choice.

Features of Exact Audio Copy

Usage of the Windows 95 and Windows NT ASPI Interface, so both SCSI and ATAPI CD-ROM drives are supported
Hidden sector synchronization (jitter correction)
Secure, fast and burst extraction methods selectable. Fast extraction should run at the same speed as other grabbers, but is probably not exact anymore. Burst mode just grabs the audio data without any synchronization.
Read error and complete loss of sync detection and correction in secure modes, as far as possible
Output of time positions of all non-exact corrections and listen to these positions
Copy of ranges of music data, not only tracks
Automatic Speed reduction on errors and fallback afterwards
Normalization of extracted audio
Usage of the Windows Audio Compression Manager (ACM Codecs) for direct compression e.g. to MP3 waves
Support for the BladeEnc DLL that is usable like an ACM Codec for online MP3 compression
Support of external MP3, VQF, RA and AAC encoders for automatic compression after extraction
Batch compression and decompression of/to WAV files
Compression offset support for exact compression/decompression
Detection of pre-track gaps
Detection of silence in pre-track gaps
Automatic creation of CUE sheets for CDRWin, including all gaps, indicies, track attributes, UPC and ISRC
CD player functionality and prelistening to selected ranges
Automatic detection of drive features, whether a drive has an accurate stream and/or does caching
Sample Offsets for drives with no accurate streams, including the option of filling up missing samples with silence
Option for synchronizing tracks for non-accurate stream drives
Filename editing with local and remote CDDB database and cdplayer.ini support and more features like ID3 tagging
Browse and edit local database
Local CDDB support
Record and Loop Record functions for recording from LP, radio, etc.
Automatic rename of MP3 files according to their ID3 tag
Catalog extraction function
Multisession (CD-Extra) support
CD-Text support
CD-Write support for some drives
ID3 Tag editor with drag and drop possibility from track listing and database
Glitch removal after extraction
Small WAV editor with the following functionality: delete, trim, normalize, pad, glitch removal, pop detection, interpolation of ranges, noise reduction, fade in/out, undo (and more)
Program is Cardware, so feel free to copy

Exact Audio Copy

Features of Exact Audio Copy

Exact Audio Copy Guides

Exact Audio Copy General Guides

Exact Audio Copy Compression Guides

Additional reading