How to Rip a CD Like a Pro – Part 7

by on May 3rd, 2011 0 comments

Here we are, the 7th and final part of the ‘How to Rip a CD Like a Pro’ series.  It has been a long road but I think it is a road that is well worth traveling. You can now rip your CDs and enjoy a great sounding file. So lets finish up the rest of the ripping guide and the settings for MP3 rips. I’ll stop talking and we’ll get this over with!

We move on to the CUE sheet settings.

The cue sheet is a needed item if you would like to burn a perfect copy of your original disk from your ripped files. It is used for showing a CD burner how to structure the files in the same way as they were on the original disk (also for other metadata properties).

  • Click on Create CUE Sheet… Multiple WAV Files With Gaps… (Noncompliant) under the Action menu.

If you have set a directory for extraction in the EAC Options/Directories tab, you will not be asked where you want to save the cue file. EAC will save it to this directory without confirmation.

It is really important that you select the noncompliant option – the other versions of cue sheets would not be of much use for the kind of rip you are about to make.

  • While you are looking at this menu: make sure “Append Gaps To Previous Track (default)” is checked. Do not touch it. The noncompliant cue sheet you creating is designed to go with this kind of gap handling.

Onto the Test & Copy

Now it is time to start EAC ripping those wave files and compressing them into FLAC files.

You can do this in different ways, all with the same result:

  • Select all the tracks, click Test & Copy Selected Tracks – Compressed… in the Action menu:

or

  • Select all the tracks, right-click and click Test & Copy Selected Tracks – Compressed

Make sure that you select Compressed, or EAC will only rip the files to wave, and will not start flac.exe to compress the files to FLAC.

Now the ripping process.

It can take anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours to rip a disk, depending on the drive, the length of the CD and how much EAC needs to work with correcting errors. You can follow the process as EAC rips the disk , with estimated information for both the track that EAC is currently testing or copying and the whole CD. If there are imperfections on the disk, EAC tries to correct the errors. The ripping process may go very slow during error correction. That is good thing it means that EAC is doing its job properly.

Do not shut down EAC when EAC says Audio Extraction Complete. Remember that flac.exe compresses the tracks to FLAC after EAC has ripped them to .wav, so do not to shut down EAC when you can see that compression is still taking place:

  • When the Audio Extraction is finished and the compression has also finished, click OK.

And now the Status Report

If you checked Show status dialog after extraction, you will get a status report when you click OK to the Audio Extraction Complete message.

The phrase you  are looking for is “No errors occurred”.

  • If there are no errors, click OK. If there are errors, you might want to read the information about them before clicking OK.

Do not click on Create Log. The log file is created automatically if you have followed the Setup Guide correctly.

If you do get errors, you cannot do anything except rip the CD again. Occasionally errors happen because your disk is stained or scratched, so it is a good plan to take the CD out and clean or repair it before ripping it again. Then start from step 3 again. EAC will remember edited CD information, but you need to detect the gaps again.

A disk that will not be properly ripped with one drive might rip without a problem with another one, so if you have access to more than one drive, try with the other one. Of course the other drive must be properly set up, too.

Lastly we look at your files.

In Explorer, you will find your newly ripped CD in the default save directory.

  • Depending on the settings, the cue sheet may be found directly under the save directory instead of being saved in the album folder. Move them into the album folder.

The album folder should now contain all the tracks, plus log file, cue sheet, and possibly also a .m3u playlist.

MP3 rip settings.

First off you need to get LAME: download the latest stable/final version. Your download will be a .zip file. You can either extract it to a folder on the desktop and then move lame.exe to your EAC folder, or create a new folder (for example C:\Program Files\LAME), and extract all the files in the .zip archive to that folder.

As mentioned in the introduction, all the settings will be the same as shown in the (for FLAC), except for the compression settings. In order to change them, hit F11 or click the EAC menu – Compression Options. Choose the “External Compression” tab.

Settings:

  • Use external program for compression: Checked.
  • Parameter passing scheme: Select “User Defined Encoder” in the dropdown menu.
  • Use file extension: .mp3 – remember the dot before “mp3”, and do not type “MP3”, or “Mp3”. The program will copy what you type here exactly the way you typed it!
  • Program, including path, used for compression: browse to lame.exe, which will of course be in the EAC folder if you put it there, or in the LAME folder if you created one. The picture shows the latter alternative.
  • Additional Command Line Options:

Select, then copy one of these lines (depending on which preset you are creating a profile for), and paste into the box in EAC:

a) For V0 rips:
-V 0 –vbr-new –add-id3v2 –ignore-tag-errors –ta “%a” –tt “%t” –tg “%m” –tl “%g” –ty “%y” –tn “%n” %s %d

b) For V2 rips:
-V 2 –vbr-new –add-id3v2 –ignore-tag-errors –ta “%a” –tt “%t” –tg “%m” –tl “%g” –ty “%y” –tn “%n” %s %d

c) For 320 CBR rips:
-b 320 -h –add-id3v2 –ignore-tag-errors –ta “%a” –tt “%t” –tg “%m” –tl “%g” –ty “%y” –tn “%n” %s %d

  • Bitrate: Will be ignored, so it does not matter what it says.
  • Delete WAV after compression: Checked (unless, for some reason, you want to keep the wave files).
  • Use CRC check: Unchecked.
  • Add ID3 tag: Unchecked.
  • Check for external programs return code: Checked.
  • High/Low quality: Leave this at “High” – it will have no influence on a rip made with these command lines anyway.

When you are done with the settings, save the profile as described previously. Give the profile a descriptive name, such as “[Drive name] mp3 V0” or “[Drive name] mp3 320 CBR”, or whatever you want.

The LAME DLL Tab

If you add lame_enc.dll to your EAC folder, a new tab will appear in Compression options.

It works in combination with selecting the LAME DLL encoder in the Waveform tab.

However, if you set an external compressor for LAME as described above, the LAME DLL settings will be overwritten. In other words, they will not affect how EAC performs the compression to mp3. I recommend sticking to the external compression method with lame.exe, at least for now.

That will do it for the stupid long guide on how to properly rip a CD at the highest quality possible. Thank you for reading and now enjoy all those old disks in proper fashion on your PC or MP3 player.