Steve’s Tech Guide

Over the past couple of days I’ve been quite obsessed about researching MP3 quality, and trying to get the best quality possible out of my Megadeth Warchest CDs. So far what I’ve found is that the documentation on this is quite scattered and you have to find the most that you can and piece it together, because a lot of data is either out-dated or there just hasn’t really been any development on it so stuff was decided 5 years ago still applies.

Today, I’m going to show you how to rip high quality MP3s from your CDs with Exact Audio Copy. Exact Audio Copy is an amazing free audio grabber. It rips audio from CDs with amazingly accurate technology that reads CDs almost perfectly and makes corrections if necessary due to scratches or any sort of things. But the reason why we’re writing this post is that Exact Audio Copy isn’t quite so easy to setup and get running.

How To Setup and Configure Exact Audio Copy

1. First, you’ll need to download Exact Audio Copy, and install it. Then open it and the Configuration Wizard should pop up. Click ‘Next’.
2. Now it will detect the drives on your system and ask you to select which drives you want to configure. If you want to configure more than one check both of them, or if you just want to configure only a certain drive select only that drive.
3. The next Exact Audio Copy window will tell you that it’s going to configure the specified drive and asks you to select an option depending on whether you want accurate ripping results, or speed is the only important thing. Select ‘I prefer to have accurate results’.
4. After that, Exact Audio Copy will most likely find the drive in its drive feature database and will ask if you want to use the specified configuration data for the drive. Select ‘I don’t trust these values, detect the features for my drive.’, because some of the information could be configured differently and each drive is different depending on settings and what not.
5. Exact Audio Copy is going to autodetect the drives features. Put in a clean, unscratched audio CD, not a burned CD, a real CD that’s been factory made. Click ‘Next’ and wait a couple of minutes for it to detect the features.
   Waiting…
   
6. After it has detected your drives features it will tell you if your drive supports Accurate stream, Audio cache and C2 error information. Click Next.
7. Exact Audio Copy will tell you that all your drives have been configured and it will automatically select the Best drive. Don’t pay attention to this, because it is merely selected based on features, and not drive performance. Click ‘Next’.
8. The next window Exact Audio Copy explains about audio encoders, and gives a little intro about which ones you should use for what purpose. Basically use a lossless codec, like FLAC, or WAV to archive and create complete copies of your disks for perfect quality and archival purposes. While for MP3 players and listening you should a lossy format like MP3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis. Click ‘Next’.
9. Exact Audio Copy’s next window is going to ask you to pick which format you want to rip the CDs in. Select ‘MP3 files (around 1.5 MB/minute)’.
10. In the next window, Exact Audio Copy tells you to go grab LAME MP3 encoder. Click ‘Next’.
    
11. Now Exact Audio Copy is going to search for LAME MP3 encoder, and try to configure LAME to use with EAC. If you don’t have it already, go ahead and download the LAME MP3 encoder and install it into a directory. Click ‘Browse’ and find where you installed LAME. Then click ‘Next’.
12. Now EAC asks you to put in your email address so it can access freedb. freedb is an internet database that contains loads of artist and album info, when you rip your CD EAC will refer to this database if it can’t find the album information and fill it in for your CD. Click ‘Next’.
13. EAC’s next windows deals with the naming scheme for the music files. Select whichever one you want. I usually just leave it at the default setting.
14. The next window on EAC tells you that the configuration wizard has been completed and asks you if you want the beginner options or the expert options. Select ‘I am an expert, let me use the full potential of EAC’. Click ‘Finish’.

How To Rip High Quality MP3s From CDs With Exact Audio Copy

After configuring your EAC settings you should be ready to rip your high quality MP3s with EAC. These settings are the best MP3 settings I have found, and according to scientific tests people could not hear a difference between the direct playing, and the MP3 copy.

High Quality: HiFi, home or quiet listening
-V 3 –vbr-new (~175 kbps), -V 2 –vbr-new (~190 kbps), -V 1 –vbr-new (~210 kbps) or -V 0 –vbr-new (~230 kbps) are recommended.
These settings will produce transparent encoding (transparent = most people cannot distinguish the mp3 from the original in an ABX blindtest).
Audible differences between these presets exist, but are extremely marginal.
- Taken from Hydrogenaudio Forums

1. Click on the ‘EAC’ menu, and go to ‘Compression options’. Click on the ‘External Compression’ tab. Change ‘Parameter passing scheme:’ to ‘User Defined Encoder’, and change the ‘Additional command-line options:’ to ‘%l-V 5%l%h-V 2%h –vbr-new %s %d’. The bitrate doesn’t matter, because anything put in the command-line will override the rest of the settings. Be sure to check ‘Check for external programs return code’.
   
2. Click ‘OK’. Insert your CD that you want to rip from. Now highlight all the tracks.
3. Click on the ‘Action’ Menu, then ‘Copy Selected Tracks’, and then ‘Compressed’. EAC will ask where to save the audio files, and it says in the file name that it will be ignored, because you previously set how the filename will be setup.
4. After you select where to save it EAC will start ripping the tracks, and after the tracks are ripped it will encode them into your selected file format and quality. When it is done it will show up with a log to tell you how everything went.

It may take an or two to do depending on your hardware, but do not fret, you will have best quality MP3s possible, and it’s well worth it, especially if you have good headphones or a good speaker setup.