Welcome back to Part 3 of my ongoing series on ripping those old CD’s like a professional, you can view Part 2 here. You are probably surprised at the number of steps it takes to get a good audio rip of your CDs, I was too when I first did this, but I am very glad that I took the time to learn. The end result is 100% worth it.

We’re covering the configuration of EAC options in this section.

First thing, you need to make sure you have got access to all the options required for properly configuring EAC for fantastic copying.

• Press the F9 key or click on the EAC menu and click EAC options. Click the tab labeled Tools and confirm that “Activate beginner mode, disable all advanced features” is unchecked. If it had been checked and you needed to uncheck it, click OK to make the advanced settings take effect, close and then open EAC Options again.

Now it is time to begin configuring the EAC options:

• Click on the Extraction tab:

Important  Extraction settings:

• Fill up missing offset samples with silence: Checked.

• No use of null samples for CRC calculations: Unchecked.

• Synchronize between tracks: Checked.

• Delete leading and trailing silent blocks: Unchecked.

• Error recovery: High.

• Skip track extraction on read or sync errors: Your decision.

It is probably a good idea to check this if your goal is perfect rips. Your rip will not be perfect if there are read or sync errors on the tracks, so you will save time by just getting the error reports without EAC having to spend time slowly ripping the tracks. If  errors are present, clean or repair your CD and try again.

• Skip track extraction after duration longer than: Your decision.

• After each: XX mins of extraction, cool down the drive for YY mins: Use only if necessary.

• Lock drive tray during extraction: Your decision. Check it if you are prone to accidentally open drives in use.

• Extraction and compression priority: Normal for most situations; Idle for old and slow computers; High for computers with multi-core processors or multiple CPUs.

We move to the General tab now:

These settings do not have any influence on the ripped quality of your CD’s, so these settings are totally up to you. I would suggest you use this one:

• On unknown CDs: automatically access online freedb database. Checked.

If the CD you are going to rip is in the Freedb database, it will automatically add the data in EAC.

• Checking “Show status dialog after extraction” will make the pop-up status report mentioned in show up. If you leave this unchecked, you will not get that pop-up.

• If you do not uncheck “Beep after extraction finished”, you will have an annoying beep (using the computer’s internal speaker) after each track is finished.

• Also, this is where you choose the language for the EAC interface.

Now we move onto the Tools tab:

Important settings:

• Automatically write status report after extraction: Checked. This automatically creates and saves log files for your rip.

• Do not open external compressor window: Unchecked – this is useful  if you want to see that the external compressor is running after EAC has completed ripping to .wav.

• Activate beginner mode, disable all advanced features: Unchecked we already went over this.

The rest of the settings:

• Retrieve UPC/ISRC codes in CUE sheet generation: Your decision – this does not change rip quality in any way. But, these codes in your cue sheet may cause issues when you try using the cue sheet to burn a CD-R.

• Use CD-Text information in CUE sheet generation: Your decision.

• Create ‘.m3u’ playlist on extraction: Your decision. If you do select it, you might want to check the option “Write .m3u playlist with extended information”.

• On extraction, start external compressors queued in the background: Checked unless you have problems

• Submit drive features after detection: Your decision.

Now we move onto the Normalization tab:

Important: Do not check this unless you do not want a perfect rip of your disk, this alters the song quality.

Now we move onto the Filename tab:

Naming your files and folder structure is totally up to you, the following will be simple examples of how this function works.

• Naming convention example #1: %D – %Y – %C\%N – %T

Setting it up like this will create a directory (the part before the backslash) and file names (the part after the backslash) looking like this:

Slayer – 1986 – Reign In Blood1 – Angel of Death.flac

If this is one you like, you can add the format you ripped into the folder name. Do remember that changing the naming convention is required if you create different profiles for ripping and compressing to different formats, like FLAC and mp3 V0.

• Naming convention example #2: %D – %Y – %C [FLAC]\%N – %T

It will look something like this: Slayer – 1986 – Reign In Blood [FLAC]1 – Angel of Death.flac

• Naming convention example #3: %D – %Y – %C (V0)\%N – %T

It will look something like this: Slayer – 1986 – Reign In Blood (V0)1 – Angel of Death.mp3

• Various Artists naming convention example #1: %C (%Y)\%N – %A – %T

This naming scheme will make EAC create a directory and file names looking like this:

Office Space (1999)1 – Cannibus/Biz Markie – Shove This Jay-Oh-Bee

• Various Artists naming convention example #2: %D – %Y – %C\%N – %A – %T

This naming scheme will make EAC create a directory and file names looking like this:

Various – 1999 – Office Space1 – Cannibus/Biz Markie – Shove This Jay-Oh-Bee

If you prefer “Various artists” to “Various”, use “Various artists” instead of “%D” in the naming convention, like this:

• Various Artists example 3: Various Artists – %Y – %C\%N – %A – %T

The resulting folder name would be “Various Artists – 1999 – Office Space”.

• Please do not ever check “Replace spaces by underscores”. It_looks_freaking_terribad.

This concludes our part 3 of the guide for ultimately awesome CD ripping for this week, we’re closing in on the good part, nearly there til we get to ripping some disks. The wait is worth it!

Thanks!