EAC is a so-called "CD ripping" or "CD grabbing" program. It is similar to programs like CDex that extract audio information from audio CDs. The information is passed through the CD-ROMs data cable, ensuring better quality than through the audio cable. What is so special about EAC is that it not only uses standard jitter correction, it will read every bit very carefully, and if it detects an error (like a scratch in the CD) it will report back it's exact position to the user. This makes the extraction process somewhat slower though, but heightens the quality of the resulting WAV file. The downside to the program is that it is pretty buggy, and is not updated all to often by the author.

Update 23.06.02: EAC is updated fairly regularly now and is still under development.

EAC is a CD ripper, along the lines of MusicMatch jukebox. Like Musicmatch it has ID3v1.1 and ID3v2 support, can encode on the fly with no interim .wav file (using LAME BladeENC, or Windows' ACM API ), Does CDDB, does everything with one click, etc. etc.

What makes it so special is that it is Postcardware (so effectively Free Beer), and has incredibly accurate CD extraction. It makes use of CD drive C2 reporting, and can detect the sample offset that the drive reads at. It re-reads sectors until it is beyond reasonable doubt what the data is, meaning that CDs copied using EAC are almost Guaranteed to be identical to the original. It doesn't do any nasty Microsoft system taking over (It can be uninstalled by deleting the directory), and it can read CDs with major scratching.

Nice.

It can be found at www.exactaudiocopy.de

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