Moving on to the Directories tab next:

While not making any difference to your ripping quality, as a privacy concern, I would suggest  you do not save to a path containing your username or any personal details. The log the is created contains the path and directory location where you are saving your rips. To boil that down, don’t save any rips to “Documents”.

If you are using a single partition on your hard drive, you can make a folder for your EAC rips directly on your C:\ partition, and set it as the default directory. It helps you in keeping the path to your files short. It is a well known problem in Windows operations systems that path lengths over 255 characters in length will not work.

If you do set a default directory, this is the location where the cue sheet for your rips will be saved automagically. If you do check “Ask every time”, a dialogue box will pop up for picking the location you want to save items to as you create the cue sheet.

The Write tab we will not be doing anything on, it has no impact on ripping quality.

Irrelevant for ripping quality.

We will move on to the Interface tab next:

• I would suggest going with the native interface:

But, if your CD drive doesn’t show up in the main EAC window:

If EAC has issues detecting features when you work on the drive configuration, you will need to add an ASPI layer to the EAC folder..

You can one from Nero if you have it installed (just copy it out of Nero’s directory, or break out your Google Fu and find/download one).

• After you download it, right click the file wnaspi32.dll and copy it, browse to the EAC directory and paste it in that very folder.

The last option is to use something like ForceASPI (Google and find a copy to download).

• If you do go ahead and use an external ASPI layer, pick “Installed external ASPI interface” instead:

We are moving on into the settings for Compression Options For Flac

We will go over MP3 settings later in the series, for now it’s all about Flac.

A lot of the settings here do not make any difference in setting up EAC to use flac.exe as an external compression system after the files are ripped to .wav. There is a lot of important information here and advice over what to do and not do.

• Press F11 or click Compression Options on the menu in EAC.

We go to the Waveform tab from here, and ignore it, as it does nothing with FLAC rips.

We’ll bypass that and move onto External Compression:

Setup:

• Use external program for compression: Checked.

• Parameter passing scheme: Select User Defined Encoder from the menu.

• Use file extension: .flac – be sure and put the period before typing flac, nothing else, EAC literally copies this line.

• Program, including path, used for compression: Click on Browse and find the flac.exe program select it and click Open. FLAC comes with your installation of EAC. You can find flac.exe in the installation folder for EAC.

• Additional Command Line Options: Select, then copy this line, and paste into the box in EAC:

-V -8 -T “artist=%a” -T “title=%t” -T “album=%g” -T “date=%y” -T “tracknumber=%n” -T “genre=%m” %s

I won’t go into the gory details of what this line means, but it is needed.

• Bitrate: This option is ignored, it makes no difference for a flac file.

• Delete WAV after compression: Checked, you might want these files for some reason, probably not.

• 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 the rip anyway.