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