CONFIGURING EAC OPTIONS

CONFIGURING EAC OPTIONS

First we will set some general options for EAC which should be the same for most users. Start Exact Audio Copy and from The EAC menu select EAC Options or press F9. This opens the EAC options dialog box. After seeing the amount of options available in EAC most new users hook off, but this is actually the easiest part of the EAC setup. Once you know the meaning of the settings setting the correct values is a breeze. This page will help you with that by giving detailed information about every setting and recommended settings. While this page may look overwhelming you can set the EAC options in a few minutes with it.

Non relevant options for a basic working EAC installation are grayed out, but will be discussed later in this tutorial when they become important. Important features have red exclamation signs !! and may affect sound quality if not set properly.

Explanation of the settings on the Extraction tab:

Fill up missing offset samples with silence: (Default: Enabled, Recommended: Enabled) When using offset correction (see later), without the drive being able to overread into lead-in/lead-out, this flag specifies if the missing samples should be filled with silence to maintain the correct track length or just left out, resulting in a WAV file with missing some samples. Since we want to get extraction results as close to the original as possible enable this option.
No use of null samples for CRC calculations: (Default: Enabled, Recommended: Disabled) When calculating CRC checksums, null samples are not counted. Otherwise also a shift will result in a different CRC even if the track has null samples at the beginning and the end. This option isn't really important and has absolutely no influence on the extraction quality. However, for people who want to experiment with offsets it may be interesting to disable this option.
Synchronize between tracks !!: (Default: Enabled, Recommended: Enabled) At track junctions EAC is able to do a jitter/synchronize correction between the two tracks, making it sure that no pops/gaps will occur on these junctions. This works of course only if adjacent tracks are extracted. Enable this option.
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks: (Default: Disabled, Recommended: Disabled) If a track (or range) contains silence at the beginning and/or the end, EAC can remove these (only blockwise). Of course this will result in a WAV that is shorter than the original track. Since we want 100% copies leave this option disabled.
Skip track extraction on read or sync errors: (Default: Disabled, Recommended: Disabled) If selected, EAC will, on the first occurrence of a read or sync error, skip the actual track and proceed with the next one. It's recommended to leave this option disabled. Thanks to EAC's advanced extraction method tracks with read and/or sync errors often have no audible artifacts. When such an error occurs, EAC will display it in the log file so you can listen to the suspicious position and decide for yourself whether or not you can hear an artifact. When a read or sync error occurred the extraction is no longer guaranteed to be accurate, but it's in my opinion better to have a copy with a few wrong samples you cannot hear, than no copy at all Of course, EAC can't do miracles so it is possible that artifacts are introduced due to read and/or sync errors on badly scratched CDs. It's up to you to decide whether or not you can hear the artifacts.
Skip track extraction after duration longer than: (Default: Disabled, Recommended: Disabled) If selected, EAC will, after extracting a given time on a track, skip the actual track and proceed with the next one. This is handy if error correction takes too long, making error-free extraction nearly unfeasible. On the other hand you sometimes want to give a badly damaged track a try in which case the extraction process can take up to several hours. Then it's of course better to leave this option disabled! Some of you may think that it's stupid to leave this options disabled because if a track takes that long it contains that much errors it probably is no longer a 'pleasure for the ear'. However, examples are known of people extracting CDs which took over 15 hours to complete with only a few audible artifacts and those could be easily removed in a wave editor.
After each xx mins of extraction, cool down the drive for yy mins: (Default: Disabled) On difficult, error-full extractions it is often a good idea to pause the extraction within a specific time interval, in order to prevent any damage of the CD-ROM drive. EAC's advanced reading method causes a lot more movement of the laser unit what may cause excessive heat production with certain CD-ROMs. The heat may decrease reading performance so if you experience problems during long extractions it may be a good idea to enable this option. Otherwise leave it disabled.
Lock drive tray during extraction: (Default: Enabled, Recommended: Enabled) EAC will lock the CD-ROM drive tray to make sure that the user don't open it by accident during the extraction process. If not selected, the tray would open during an extraction, but leaving EAC in an unknown state. Enable this option to avoid problems.
Extraction and compression priority: (Default: Normal, Recommended: Normal) Just leave this setting alone. Increasing priority will make other applications work 'choppy'.
Error recovery quality !!: (Default: Medium, Recommended: High) There are three levels of error correction, also visible in the number of error-display rows in the extraction dialog. This only specifies how many rereads will be done before giving up. Since we want the highest possible quality for our extracted tracks set this to 'High'.

Explanation of the settings on the General tab:

Use alternate CD play routines: (Default: Disabled) Normally EAC will play (not extract of course) through the analog output of the CD-ROM and soundcard. When this option is enabled all CD play routines will work by extracting and digitally sending the audio data to the sound card. This has the advantage that no cable has to be installed between the drive and the soundcard. This is especially cool in Windows 2000 where other programs can also do this by setting this in Device Manager. Note that this feature is only recommended if you have a CD-ROM that is quite good in Digital Audio Extraction.
Disable 'CD Autostart' for audio and data CDs while EAC running: (Default: Enabled, Recommended: Enabled) EAC will disable Windows CD autostart feature in order all times a new CD is inserted to not have pop up either the Windows CD player or start the setup program of the CD. Enable this so autorun cannot disturb EAC.
Display time using frames: (Default: Disabled, Recommended: Disabled) It is possible to display the time information in the main window in two different formats, either as 1/100 seconds or as 1/75 seconds (frames) which is more native to the CD. The frame display is always exact while hundredth of seconds will be rounded. 1 second = 75 frames. Most people will prefer the 1/100 seconds format so leave this option disabled.
Ask before overwriting files: (Default: Enabled, Recommended: Enabled) If a track with the specific filename on the CD already exists, EAC is able to either ask if the file really should be overwritten or just overwrite without asking. Enabling this option can save you a lot of troubles.
Correct bug of wrong filename order in Windows multiple file dialog: (Default: Enabled, Recommended: Enabled) The Windows file selection box has some strange behavior that occurs when selecting multiple files, the first and last track will be exchanged. This occurs when clicking the last file of the list as the last one. This function will correct this and exchange both files again.
Show status dialog after extraction: (Default: Enabled, Recommended: Enabled) Here you could select if EAC should show up the Extraction Status dialog after extraction. The status dialog will show error messages occurred during extraction and will report track quality and suspicious positions. This MUST be enabled.
Beep after extraction finished: (Default: Enabled, Recommended: Enabled) After extraction is finished EAC is able to perform a Windows Beep.
Eject CD after extraction finished: (Default: Disabled, Recommended: Disabled) Makes the CD eject after extraction finished just like some CD-R burning applications do. If you have a lot of CDs to extract this may be handy for lazy people ;)
After extraction finished - Power down computer: (Default: Disabled, Recommended: Disabled) If selected, EAC will power down the computer after an extraction has finished. May be useful when you try to extract a CD that takes hours due to reading errors and you want to bed
After extraction finished - Restart computer: (Default: Disabled, Recommended: Disabled) Same as above, but in this case EAC will reset the computer in order to start up new for a clean environment.

Explanation of the settings on the Tools tab:

Retrieve UPC/ISRC codes in CUE sheet generation: (Default: Disabled, Recommended: Disabled) On automatically generating a CUE sheet for a CD, it is possible to add also its UPC and ISRCs. These codes identify products and manufacturers. This is usually only required for professional CD mastering. Codes are assigned on a country-by-country basis. In practice only few CDs seem to effective use this information and retrieving could be quite time consuming on some CDs. Disable.
Use CD-Text information in CUE sheet generation: Add PERFORMER and TITLE to CUE sheets that are created. If the program and writer supports CD-Text these information will be written automatically to the CD. This information is taken from the main window and from the CD Informations dialog. If you plan to use EAC in conjunction with CDRWin or the EAC write function to copy audio CDs and your writer supports CD-TEXT enable this. See below for an example of a CUE sheet with and without CD-TEXT information. Create '.m3u' playlist on extraction: (Default: Disabled, Recommended: Disabled) If selected, EAC will automatically write an '.m3u' playlist to the chosen directory, name is generated from the CD name. Only tracks selected for extraction will be listed in this file. This may be a handy option if you extract to MP3s. Then EAC will automatically create WinAMP playlists for the extracted CDs.
Automatically write status report after extraction: (Default: Disabled, Recommended: Disabled) After extraction has been finished it is possible to automatically save the status information to a file, the name will be generated from the CD title. Not really an important feature, but some people prefer to save the logs of an extracted CD.

This is what a CUE sheet looks like with and without CD-TEXT information:

Explanation of the settings on the Normalize tab:

Normalize !!: (Default: Disabled, Recommended: Disabled) Normalizing a track means to change its volume to a given maximum loudness, 100% means that the song (in the file) will be as loud as possible (without clipping) (0 dB) and 25% means that the volume will be only a fourth of the maximum possible loudness (-12 dB). This could be handy to bring all songs of a compilation to the same maximum loudness, but could also destroy the intended effect (dynamics) created by a composer.

However, there's a serious drawback: normalized tracks are no longer 100% the same as the original because of rounding. For example assume values 0, 1, 2 and 3. Assuming 3 is 100% (audio is 16 bit but we'll use 2 bit to make the effect more clear), normalizing to 50% would result in 0, 0.5, 1 and 1,5. Since we are using 2 bit resolution the floating point values are impossible and must be rounded what leads to 0, 1, 1, what is in no way half the original signal! While our example with 2 bit resolution has only 4 values, audio has 16 bit resolution and thus 65536 different values. The effect of normalizing isn't audible (though some 'claim' they can hear it my answer; prove it :)

Also you don't want to normalize CDs that have no pauses between the tracks because each track will get a different volume.

Normalize to: (Default: 98%) This is the level of normalization, 100% is maximum value. Usually for maximum loudness a few percent lower value is taken to prevent clipping by the output devices.
But only, if Peak Level is smaller than: (Default: 85%) Here you can choose for what tracks normalization should be done. It should be done if a track has a low maximum volume. All tracks with a volume below this value will be normalized.
But only, if Peak Level is greater than: (Default: 99%) Here you can choose for what tracks normalization should be done. It should be done if a track has an extreme high maximum volume. All tracks with a volume higher than this value will be normalized.

If you use normalizing the default value is 98% and it is recommended to use that value. Also 'But only if peak level is smaller than 85% or greater than 99%' is used in most other programs too. This will speed up extraction a lot as not all tracks have to be normalized since most have peak values between 85% and 99%. Also there isn't that much difference in loudness between 85% and 99%.

Explanation of the settings on the Filename tab:

Construction of save filenames: (Default: %T) In this field you can select how the filename of an extracted track is constructed. By choosing placeholders for properties of the CD you could create any filename you want. Of course you can also write text normally, and you can specify a '' to tell that it should be in a subdirectory. If the subdirectory does not exists, it will be created. There is a limitation that you can't specify an absolute position (e.g. 'C directory%T' or '%T'). There are quite a lot tags you can use. A few examples are given below.
Replace spaces by underscores: (Default: Disabled, Recommended: Disabled) If selected, all spaces in filenames that are created will be replaced by underscores ('_'). 'Artist - Track01.wav' would turn into 'Artist_-_Track01.wav'.

Save filenames examples:

Explanation of the settings on the Directories tab:

Here you can set to use a default directory for saving the tracks or the last used directory.

Ask every time (default showing last used directory): (Default: Enabled, Recommended: Enabled) If this is selected, EAC will ask always for the destination directory of all extractions.
Use this directory: (Default: Disabled, Recommended: Disabled) You can specify a directory to where all extractions are targeted.

Explanation of the settings on the Interface tab:

Here you can select the SCSI interface. Always use 'Installed external ASPI interface', also if you use NT or 2000. There's a bug in the 'Native Win32 interface for Win NT & 2000'.

Installed external ASPI interface: (Default: Enabled, Recommended: Enabled) An external SCSI/IDE interface, called ASPI, will be used. For best compatibility you should use the one from Adaptec. Obtain the Adaptec ASPI layer.
Native Win32 interface for Win NT & 2000: (Default: Disabled, Recommended: Disabled) The SCSI/IDE interface used will be the one provided by EAC. This works only for Windows NT and Windows 2000, but it could result in some problems because bugs could occur anytime.

Click OK to save the settings. EAC itself is now configured for basic use. As you may have noticed see we have forgotten a few tabs. No worries though, these tabs are not important at this point and will be discussed later where they become important.

It's a good idea to close Exact Audio Copy at this point. Exact Audio Copy saves it's settings to the registry on shutdown so if the program crashes or locks up during one of the next configuration steps you don't lose all your settings.

The next step is the configuration of the drive(s) used for extraction. That step is one of the most important because if you don't do it properly the extraction process will not give accurate results.

EAC DRIVE CONFIGURATION

Launch Exact Audio Copy and select the device you want to use for extraction in the top left drop down box. This is in most cases your CD-ROM. If you want to use multiple devices or just test which one gives the best results with EAC you'll have to repeat all steps on this page for each device you want to use. EAC stores the settings of each drive separate in the Windows Registry so you don't have to worry about settings being overwritten when experimenting with other drives. In our example we'll configure the Plextor UltraPlex PX-32TSi CD-ROM drive.

Insert an audio CD in the device you want to setup. After a few moments EAC will list the CD contents on the main screen. It should look like the screenshot below.

Don't worry if you don't understand what every column is for. That will be explained later.

From the EAC menu select Drive Options or press F10. A warning message will be displayed telling you that it's important to select the proper reading mode for your CD-ROM drive. If an incorrect reading mode is used Exact Audio Copy will probably not be able to detect read errors. Determining the correct drive settings is a lot easier than in the past. Now EAC features auto detect options which determine the optimal reading mode for you. Click OK to pass the warning message.

The Options screen for your CD-ROM drive should now appear. You can verify that you have selected the correct drive by the displayed name in the title bar of the dialog window.

Extraction Method tab:

Click the Detect Read Features button. EAC will now try to auto detect the drive's reading features. Don't produce any load during the detection or the results may be incorrect. The detection process may take a few minutes up to over 10 minutes depending on the drive. Thus, be patient.

Exact Audio Copy will auto detect the correct options on this tab, but I've included detailed explanations of each option below. It's always better that you actually know what you are doing. In this tutorial we'll only discuss the secure reading mode. The other reading mode are not suitable for high quality audio extraction and are not documented therefore.

Secure modes - Secure mode with following drive features (recommended) !!: The extracted audio is checked for correctness and if errors occur, EAC will try to recover them. It is important that the correct Secure Mode settings are used. This extraction method is the preferred extraction method. If your CD-ROM does not work in Secure mode you better start looking for another CD-ROM because perfect copies won't be possible
Drive has 'Accurate Stream' feature !!: This options should be set, if your drive has an accurate stream, meaning that it won't jitter, thus no jitter-correction has to be performed anymore.
Drive caches audio data !!: EAC reads every audio sector twice and compares them. If the two sectors are different EAC knows that a read error occurred and will reread the suspicious sector over and over again until a satisfying result is achieved (or an error reported to the user). If a drive caches audio data EAC will read the audio data from the cache on the second read attempt instead of from the CD. Of course the buffer always gives the same sector to EAC so the error detection no longer works. If the first sector is read incorrect EAC will not detect this as the buffer will give EAC the faulty audio sector twice. Since no difference between the two sectors is detected EAC will assume that the sector is read correct what is obviously not true. In this case the 'Drive caches audio data' option has to be enabled, so that EAC will clear the cache by overreading it.
Drive is capable of Retrieving C2 error information !!: Some newer drives are able to return C2 error information beside the actual audio data. C2 error information tells the software that the drive detected a possible read error. With C2 error retrieval enabled EAC doesn't need to read all data twice anymore, which will result in a big speedup. But beware, in the drive feature detection some drives will report that they will support C2, but they do actually not. To test this feature more thoroughly, there is an additional test function 'Examine C2 Feature' at the bottom.

EAC cannot determine the drive reading features or locks up:

In some cases EAC is not able to determine the correct reading features of the used drive. This can have various reasons. In this case you'll have to set the options manually. If you are lucky your drive is in the User Reported Drive Features database. All you have to do then is setting the drive settings according to the values in the database. If your drive is not listed and you really don't have any idea what options your drive supports visit the Exact Audio Copy homepage and subscribe yourself to the EAC mailing list. Hundreds of helpful people there will try to help you with your problem.

Reading features:

After Exact Audio Copy completed the detection of the drive's reading features click the Apply button to parse your settings to EAC. Clicking the OK button will not pass the settings to EAC! On the left you can see a screenshot of the detected settings of the Plextor UltraPlex PX-32TSi. As you can see the drive supports C2 error retrieval and Accurate Stream (grayed out when C2 error retrieval is selected too since the C2 feature cannot work on a drive without Accurate Stream).

You'll want a drive that does Accurate Stream. Caching is not preferred. While caching will not affect the sound quality it will slow down the extraction process as EAC has to clear the buffer on every read attempt. If your drive supports C2 error retrieval that's a nice add-on which greatly improves performance since EAC has to read every sector only once instead of twice to detect read errors. However, some drives falsely report that they support C2 error detection. In this case the extraction process is fast but also totally inaccurate.

You can check your drive's C2 error retrieval correctness by inserting a badly scratched CD in the drive and using EAC's C2 examination feature. Why scratched? Because a clean CD doesn't report any errors! Click the Examine C2 Feature button to start the test. Depending on the location of the errors on the disc this can take several minutes. If EAC reports that C2 error information was found you can be pretty sure that your drive supports the C2 error retrieval feature. However, the next problem raises: Some drive do support C2 error detection, but don't have it implemented correctly. That means that they report C2 errors where none are, and miss errors where read errors occur. It's obvious that C2 error detection, while increasing the extraction speed, also decreases the extraction's accuracy. It's difficult to test the level of accuracy of the C2 feature on a drive. If you want a 100% accurate result it's best to sacrifice the speed increase and disable the C2 error retrieval feature, even though your drive supports it. In the Help Other Users section a testing method is described to determine whether the C2 feature works correctly.

Help other users:

Not everyone is able to determine the reading settings for his drive. Therefore an online User Reported Drive Features Database was set up. If you were able to determine your settings you are strongly encouraged to contribute to this database by sending in your settings. See the Help Other Users section for detailed instructions. Even if your drive is already listed in the database you still may send in the information. The more people report their settings for a certain drive the more accurate it becomes.

You'll find this paragraph repeated more often in this tutorial. We need your help to make EAC the best audio extraction tool.

Drive tab:

On the Drive tab the drive's read command has to be set. The read command is the instruction EAC uses to read the audio CDs. You can leave the Drive read command set to Autodetect read command . EAC will then detect the correct read command every time the program starts. It is however more practical to set the read command right now so EAC doesn't have to detect it every time.

To do so simply click the Autodetect read command now button. Exact Audio Copy now detects the proper read command and will automatically select it from the drop down box.

EAC cannot determine the drive read command or locks up:

In some cases EAC is not able to determine the correct read command for the used drive. This can have various reasons. In this case you'll have to set the command manually. If you are lucky your drive is in the User Reported Drive Features database. All you have to do then is setting the drive settings according to the values in the database. If your drive is not listed and you really don't have any idea what options your drive supports visit the Exact Audio Copy homepage and subscribe yourself to the EAC mailing list. Hundreds of helpful people there will try to help you with your problem.

Help other users:

Not everyone is able to determine the read command for his drive. Therefore an online User Reported Drive Features Database was set up. If you were able to determine your settings you are strongly encouraged to contribute to this database by sending in your settings. See the Help Other Users section for detailed instructions. Even if your drive is already listed in the database you still may send in the information. The more people report their settings for a certain drive the more accurate it becomes.

Below an explanation of the other settings on this tab. These options are rarely used. Unless you experience the symptoms described, leave the settings disabled.

'Big Endian' byte order (Motorola) !!: Some drive will return samples in a wrong byte-order. 16 bit samples could be divided into 2 bytes and the order of the the bytes is reversed on these drives. If your extracted music sounds like pure noise, try to use this option.
Swap channels !!: A few (bad) drives swap the left and right stereo channel, which can be undone using this option. Some even swap channels every now and then during the extraction process.
Spin up drive before extraction !!: Some drives will already transmit data when it is just spinning up. This could result in problems at the beginning of the extraction. To make sure that the drive is at full spin, you could activate this option.

Offset / Speed tab:

This tab contains the offset settings for which EAC is well known. However, for the correct working of EAC the offsets aren't required so they will not be discussed right now. Later in the tutorial the offset issue is discussed into detail.

An explanation of the other settings on the Offset / Speed tab:

Speed selection: (Default: Actual, Recommended: Actual) If the drive support this, you will be able to select an extraction speed. This could be handy for scratched CDs, as extraction will be done in higher quality at a lower speed. The 'Actual' setting will not change the actual drive speed.
Allow speed reduction during extraction: (Default: Enabled, Recommended: Enabled) EAC is able to reduce the speed automatically when a read error occurs. It will speed up again when the erroneous passage is gone, but not all drives will speed up again.
CD-Text Read capable drive: (Default: Disabled, Recommended: Depends on the drive) If your drive supports the read of CD-Text, you have to select this option. If you are unsure you can always find this information in the manual of your drive.

Click OK to save the settings. As said in the beginning, you should repeat the above instructions for every drive you wish to use with Exact Audio Copy. When that is done EAC is finally configured for usage. That doesn't mean that all options have been set though. There are plenty left which will be discussed later, but the ones you have set should allow you to use EAC's basic features like track extraction.

As with the EAC options configuration it's a good idea to close Exact Audio Copy at this point. Exact Audio Copy saves it's settings to the registry on shutdown so if the program crashes or locks up during one of the next steps you don't lose all your settings.

EXTRACTING TRACKS

Extracting tracks to your harddisk is easy with Exact Audio Copy. Basically you just select the tracks and start the extraction. Of course it is important that you have correctly Configured The EAC Options and done the EAC Drive Configuration properly.

Insert an audio CD and wait for the CD-ROM to initialize it.

It may be interesting to enter track names for each track instead of the standard track names EAC uses. Read Entering CD Information to find out how to automatically lookup CD artist and track title information in the online CDDB or manually enter it. Once that's done the EAC main screen should display the CD information:

Prelistening the tracks

You not always want to extract every track, and often you don't know each track on a CD, thus you'll probably want to prelisten some tracks. If no tracks are selected you can use the the CD player buttons on the toolbar to listen to the CD as you would with a normal CD player. On the right you can see a description of each CD player button on the toolbar, but most of you will be familiar with the symbols and don't have a problem with that.

You can also first select some tracks and then use the CD player buttons. In this case EAC will only play the selected tracks which may be handy to verify that you really selected the correct tracks right before extraction. Especially handy for those people who use EAC's default Track01, Track02, Track03, track names.

Extracting the tracks

Select the tracks you wish to extract. Selecting tracks works similar as selecting files in Windows Explorer. Thus use the Shift and Control keys to select multiple tracks. If you select no tracks at all, EAC will select all tracks automatically when you start extraction. Once that's done you are ready for extraction. Choose Action -> Copy Selected Tracks from the menu or pres F5. Exact Audio Copy now shows a Save Waveform dialog box. No need to enter a file name. EAC will take care of that. Just browse to the location you want to save the tracks and click the Save button.

Unless things are going awful wrong the extraction process should now start. Exact Audio copy displays extraction monitoring data and progress status in the Extracting Audio Data dialog box as shown on the left.

On the top of this dialog box is displayed which track is currently being extracted. Track Progress shows the status of the current extracting track. Time is the time already elapsed and Est. Time is the estimated time left for the track to finish extraction. Total Progress shows the same information as Track Progress but for the overall extraction process. The Error correction field shows the number of rereads EAC is performing. More information about how to interpret this follows alter on this page. The Status field shows additional extraction information like possible read errors.

After extraction completed click the OK button. This will show the Status and Error Messages dialog box (right image). The CD we used as extraction example did not contain any errors as you can see in the Status and Error Messages dialog box. All tracks were extracted correct!

Some explanation of the information displayed in the Status and Error Messages log. Peak level is the loudest peak in the extracted track. Though the example screenshot has all peak levels at 100%, the maximum volume, this is not necessary true for all CDs. Some CDs (especially older ones) are recorded a lot softer. Thus if the Peak level shows a low percentage for certain tracks, don't worry. This does not mean that Exact Audio Copy was not able to extract the tracks 100% correct!!

While Peak level tells nothing about the quality of extraction, Track quality does. A Track quality of 100% obviously means that the track was extracted 100% correct. But here's where some people make mistakes; sometimes EAC rereads certain audio sectors multiple times to get accurate extraction results. For every reread EAC does, the Track quality decreases, but this does not mean that the extraction is less accurate. It is possible to have a bit-by-bit perfect copy of a track, while Track quality is lower than 100%. As long as Exact Audio Copy does not report any errors in the Status and Error Messages log, the extracted files are bit-by-bit perfect copies of the original. Track quality should be interpreted as the physical quality of the CD and not of the extracted data. A CD with some scratches or dirty fingers on will certainly cause rereads in EAC and thus a Track quality lower than 100%, but still the extracted tracks may be perfect. Thus if the log says Copy OK for a track that means it's extracted perfect - no matter of the Track quality. So, I hope that made things more clear as many people are confused by the Track quality.

Click the OK button to close the Status and Error Messages dialog.

In case of read errors

Sometimes you'll have to extract CDs with scratches. As we've seen before Exact Audio Copy reads every sector twice or uses C2 error information retrieval to detect read errors. If one is detected EAC takes action by rereading the audio sector 16 times. If the 50% of the rereads returns the same sector data the chances are minimal that these samples are wrong, and EAC will use those samples and continue. If after 16 rereads no satisfying result is returned, EAC will do another series of 16 rereads. This up to 5 times thus resulting into a maximum of no less than 80 rereads before giving up and displaying a read error. This rereading information is displayed in the Error correction gauge on the Extracting Audio Data dialog window, so let's take a closer look at it.

On the left the Error correction gauge is displayed in its initial status. If you look good (because it's somewhat vague) you see that the gauge is a raster of 5 rows of each 16 dark red blocks. Each block represents a reread.

When a read error is detected EAC starts to reread and this is shown by bright red blocks in the raster. In the example on the left you can see that the first series of 16 rereads did not return the correct sector and thus it starts a second series.

Continuing on the previous example we'll assume that EAC managed to read the correct sector information after 2 series of rereads. Even when EAC starts reading the following sectors, the maximum number of needed rereads stays displayed in the Error correction gauge as (darker) red blocks so you always can see how many rereads a CD required.

After extraction finished the Extracting Audio Data dialog box should look similar to the screenshot on the left. As you can see no more than 2 series of rereads were needed to read the whole track. Click the OK button. Now the Status and Error Messages dialog window (right image) shows up. As you can see due to the rereads the Track quality is only 97.3%, but since Exact Audio Copy also reports Copy OK you can rest assured that the track was extracted bit-by-bit perfect.

Of course EAC isn't a miracle drug, so it's not unreal that a sector cannot be read correct even after 5 series of 16 rereads. In this case EAC gives up, and reports the sector as a suspicious position.

As you can see on the left screenshot of the Extracting Audio Data dialog box, Exact Audio Copy now reports a Sync Error. If the next sector can also not be retrieved a Read Error is displayed.

After clicking OK when the extraction finished you can see the status report in the Status and Error Messages dialog window (right screenshot). New is the There were errors warning what means the extracted track may not be a bit-by-bit perfect copy anymore. It's in theory possible that even with read errors the extracted track is still a 100% perfect copy, but in practice you can be sure the extracted track contains errors. That does not mean there are audible artifacts in the extracted track!

Click the Possible Errors button on the bottom of the Status and Error Messages dialog window. This opens the Possible Errors dialog box.

All suspicious positions per track are displayed here. Just select a suspicious position in the list and click the Play button. Exact Audio Copy plays the part of the track EAC reported errors in. You can then listen to those positions and decide whether or not you can hear artifacts.

The example track on the left has 4 suspicious positions, but no audible neither a visual (checked in a wave editor) artifact could be detected. Thus even while some samples may be incorrect, it still sounds perfect.

If you hear artifacts like plops or cracks in the sound you may wish to use the Glitch Removal tool, but this tool may also remove stuff that looks like artifacts but is part of the music.

Click OK to return to the Status and Error Messages dialog.

CONFIGURING THE COMPRESSION OPTIONS

Compression is used to reduce the file size. A full 74 minutes CD takes no less than 700 MB of uncompressed WAV data. If you want to transfer this over the Internet you better have a decent connection! Therefore most people want to compress the audio data. Of course you don't want to sacrifice audio quality and that's what this part of the tutorial is about. Once you've set a few general options for the compressing we will discuss a few popular high quality encoders. 

First we will set some general options for compressing with EAC. From The EAC menu select EAC Options or press F9. This opens the EAC options dialog box. A few options we skipped during the general setup of EAC can be found here on the Tools tab and are related to compressing audio data with EAC.

On extraction, start external compressors queued in the background: (Default: Disabled, Recommended: Enabled) Using this flag will let EAC do all compression tasks during extraction using external command-line encoders in a queue and all codecs at the same time as the extraction. As compression will work beside extraction, this could result in some problems. At first, on slow computers, extraction could get more problematic and errors may occur more often or more severe. Second, using external command-line encoders in worst case, the whole CD is extracted as WAV, so up to 700 MB free space would be needed unlike compression without this option where the next track is extracted when the previous track has finished compression (and could be deleted). To test the advantage of this setting I've done some benchmarks:

Benchmark test system:

- Intel Pentium 3 1000 MHz
- 384 MB RAM
- Windows 2000
- EAC 0.9 prebeta 9
- Audio extracting device: Plextor UltraPlex 32TSi
- External encoder: LAME.EXE 3.87 (MMX) (settings: -b 256 -m s -h)

The test CDs:

- CD 1: The Stranglers - Feline (42:06)
- CD 2: Roxette - Tourism (70:37)
- CD 3: Mike Oldfield - Boxed Disc 1 (63:05)

The tests:

The idea is to extract and encode the 3 CDs as fast as possible. Therefore we use 2 possible encoding methods:

• Queued compression with the external LAME executable.
• Non queued compression (old fashion) with the external LAME executable.

The results:

How to interpret this table? Using a stopwatch all start and stop times were written down. Thus for the queued compression that means that CD 1 started extracting at time 0:00. At 0:36, that's when the first track completed extraction, the queued extraction started. After 3:06 minutes the extraction of CD 1 finished. The cool part of queued extraction is that as soon as the extraction finished, but the encoding may still be busy, you can already open the CD-ROM tray to insert the next CD and start extraction. Thus in our case extraction of CD 1 finished at 3:06 and at 3:36 CD 2 started extracting, this while the extracted CD 1 was still encoding. At 5:18 CD 1 was finally encoded and the encoding of CD 2 could start.
At 9:19 CD 3 started reading while it would take up to 13:10 before CD2 was fully encoded to the compression of CD 3 could start. Only 45 seconds later (13:55) CD 3 already finished extraction of CD 3. In other words, nearly a full CD is left to encode, thus eating a lot of disk space. This is because of LAME encodes slower than the Plextor can read audio data. Thus if we would extract & encode a lot more CDs we would need a huge amount of free disk space (several Gigabytes)
At 19:04 CD 3 finished encoding too and the job is done.

Since non queued extraction has to wait until compression finishes before you can proceed with the next CD there's no advantage of measuring the start and stop times of the compression and extraction respectively. As you can see in the table it took no less than 28:19 minutes before the 3 CDs were extracted and encoded! That's over 9 minutes slower than with queued compression.

Thing to remember for queued compression is that even though the job took 19:04 minutes, we could start extracting an eventually 4th CD already after CD 3 finished extraction at 13:55. That's 14 minutes (!!) earlier than for non queued compression. Thus it's very obvious that queued compression easily beats the other extracting & encoding method which has to wait until compression finishes before the next CD can be processed. I should add that extracting and encoding at the same moment eats a lot of resources and disk space, though the test system remained responsive in all situations and no problems occurred at all.

Do not open external compressor window: (Default: Disabled) Using an external command-line encoder, EAC will usually open a new window showing the output of the encoder. By enabling this option no new window is opened for status messages, thus no conflicts with other applications occur. On the other hand, you don't know how much of a file need still to be encoded (this is assuming that the encoder does provide this kind of information).
Even when the encoder is hidden you can still see how much compression tasks are left waiting in the status bar. In the screenshot below there are 2 compression task left. In other words, 2 tracks still need to be compressed.

Some people will prefer a visible encoder window while others get annoyed by it and will hide it. Decide for yourself. This options is just cosmetic and has absolutely no influence on quality, neither speed.

Click the OK button to save your changes.

From The EAC menu select Compression Options or press F11. This opens the Compression options window in which you can configure EAC to use compression. Exact Audio Copy supports a large amount of compressors. These compressors come in 3 classes:

Codecs

A codec is a software component that translates audio streams between its uncompressed form and compressed form. Usually codecs are installed in Windows and shared by all applications supporting codecs. The Fraunhofer IIS MPEG Layer-3 codec for example is a well known codec for encoding and decoding MP3 files.

External compressors

External compressors are stand-alone applications for compressing audio data. If they accept command-line input EAC can use them. The disadvantage is that you have to configure EAC for every external compressor's command-line because there's no standard unlike with codecs. The good thing is that EAC comes with quite a lot parameter passing schemes for the most well known external compressors. External compressors have the advantage of being very configurable. You can alter the command-line input manually, thus allowing every possible option to be set. Codecs or DLL based compressors usually don't have this freedom. Well known external compressors are LAME and Shorten.

DLL based compressors

Certain external compressors are also available as a Dynamic Linked Library, more popular called a DLL. DLL based compressors are invisible to the user, just like codecs. A program which wants to use such a DLL has to be written to support this specific DLL. It's very similar to a codec, but there's no standard as with codecs. Thus for every DLL based compressor a program wants to use, code has to be written. When a new version of the DLL comes available there's the possibility that it's no longer compatible. Therefore most programs do not support this type of compressors or just only one. Exact Audio Copy however, does support the LAME and BladeEnc DLL based compressors.

Encoder offsets

Before we choose and configure the actual compressor a few general options are left to set in the Compression options. Select the Offset tab.

Use Offset Correction for encoding and decoding: (Default: Disabled, Recommended: Disabled) Some compressors do not compress the audio data as is, but they introduce an offset error so that at the beginning is silence and at the end often these number of samples (or more) are missing. This could be bad for compressed live recordings, as they can't be reproduced without gap anymore. By specifying this flag on compression the file will be stuffed and on decompression, by using the offset, the original file could be reconstructed (in most cases).
I do not recommend to use this option. The offset detection uses the default installed codec to determine the offset of the selected compressor, and this codec is not per definition the decoder you use to decode the files! For example, if you use the LAME encoder and have the Fraunhofer codec installed for playing MP3 files, EAC will detect and use the offset between those two. However when you use LAME to decode your files instead of Fraunhofer you are using the wrong offset! And if you distribute your compressed files, how can you know which decoder the recipients will use to decode your files. Some encoders (LAME for example) even already correct their own offset (that is if you use LAME for both encoding and decoding). Thus leave this option disabled unless you know what you are doing and are sure that you have the correct offset correction!

ID3 tagging

The MP3 compression format can contain extra information (tags) like artist, track title, comments, in the compressed file. This is called the ID3 tag. Most MP3 players display this information which makes it more pleasant to read than a sometimes cryptic file name. If you want to use Exact Audio Copy to compress to MP3 files you'll want to set the ID3 options. For more information about ID3 tags head over to the ID3v2 website. Today also a few other compression formats can take advantage of the ID3 tag. Monkey's Audio is one of them.

Write 'Track <tracknumber>' into ID3 Tag comment field: When using ID3 Tags, you are able to store a comment field within it. Now it is possible for EAC to store different strings into it automatically on creation. In this case EAC will store the track number into the comment field.
Write CRC checksum into ID3 Tag comment field: EAC will write the tracks CRC checksum into the comment field, which should be the same on a second error free extraction, but of course only for offset corrected reads or drives of the same model.
Write following text into ID3 Tag comment field: Using this option, EAC will write always the same string into all ID3 Tags to be created. This string can be specified in the text box below and may have maximum length of 29 (ID3 V1.1) - 30 (ID3 V1.0) characters. This is probably the one you'll want to use. Most people prefer to put their alias, e-mail, link to website or other information in the comment field.

On the next tab (ID3 Tag) you can specify which ID3 versions will be stored in the compressed file.

Use ID3 V1.1 tags: (Default: Disabled) In the newer ID3 format V1.1 it is possible to store additionally the track number on the CD in the ID3 Tag. Most newer player are compatible with the newer standard, but not all resulting in a comment with a funny character at the end.
Additionally write ID3 V2 tags: (Default: Enabled, Recommended: Depends on the compressor) Unlike ID3v1.x, the new ID3v2.x tag is written at the beginning of the file. This may result in incompatibilities with older players and decoders. ID3v2 features a lot new tags you can use (but EAC does not yet use). Personally I like the ID3v2 tags because they finally get rid of the 30 characters tag length limitation of ID3v1 and are useable for streaming. Exact Audio Copy uses the newest ID3v2.4.0 tags. That has as a side effect that many applications which are not yet up to date will not see the ID3v2 tags written by EAC. WinAMP for example will not display EAC's ID3v2.4.0 tags since the program is only compatible up to ID3v2.3.0. Luckily there's a trick to force EAC to write the commonly supported ID3v2.3.0 tags.
Using a padding of: (Default: 4 kB, Recommended: 4 kB) Because the ID3v2 tag is written at the start of a file, it would be difficult to edit such a tag once written. You could reserve some space for later usage and additions. If no space would be reserved, an edit operation will result in copying the whole file.

Click the OK button to save your settings. Now you are ready to choose and set a compressor! 

Which compressor to use

First you have to decide what kind of compressor you want. There are 2 kinds:

• Loss less compression
• Lossy compression

Loss less compression

As the name already imply, loss less compression reduces the size of the files without quality loss. Thus after decoding you have exactly the same file again as you started with. The drawback is that the compression ratio is usually not that high. Trading groups that distribute music over the Internet almost always demand loss less compression for file distribution. In this tutorial we'll explain the usage of the popular loss less Shorten and Monkey's Audio compressors.

Shorten 3.1:

• Very good compression and speed
• Best known

Monkey's Audio 3.80:

• Fastest and best compression with the default settings (though compression is only slightly better than Shorten)
• Support for ID3 tags

Both Shorten and Monkey Audio are excellent loss less compressors, but Monkey's Audio definitely wins. On the other hand, Shorten is very popular on trading lists.

Lossy compression

Lossy compression implies a loss of quality during encoding. The higher the compression ratio the higher the loss for a certain compressor. Nowadays there are several high quality lossy compression formats. Their quality is that good that even with very high compression ratios the audio quality is perfect (to the ear). One of these formats is MP3. MP3 is without doubt the most popular compression format for audio of the moment. There are quite a lot MP3 encoders available, but not all produce equal quality. In fact, most actually introduce artifacts or too much signal loss even at the highest quality settings. But with a good encoder and the right settings you should be able to create MP3 files which cannot be distinguished from the original, not even by a trained ear! Of course it is possible to fool the psycho- acoustic model of an MP3 encoder. A well known example is the intro of Kalifornia, performed by Fatboy Slim. The artificial distorted voices in this intro bring every MP3 encoder to its knees leaving artifacts audible for a trained ear with good audio equipment.

So what MP3 encoders are good? This is a difficult question, but r3mix.net - the reference site when it comes to MP3 quality - made a comparison of the most popular MP3 encoders and it's obvious that LAME 3.8 followed by Fraunhofer 1.263 are the best, and by a wide margin. That's why I'll only discuss these 2 encoders here, especially since many people already have the Fraunhofer codec or else they can download the free LAME encoder.

LAME 3.8:

• Best quality at high (constant) bitrates
• Best variable bitrate quality and compression
• Very fast encoder
• Often updated for even better quality and speed

Fraunhofer 1.263:

• Very good quality at high and low (constant) bitrates
• Mediocre variable bitrate quality and performance
• Rather slow encoder
• Not updated. Newer versions are not on par with this version

My personal recommendations: Use LAME 3.8 whenever possible unless you want low constant bitrate MP3s (128 kBit/s and less). That's what Fraunhofer excels in. The newer Fraunhofer encoders have better variable bitrate performance, but their quality is lower than the good old 1.263. Avoid 'em! If you want variable bitrate encoding go for LAME!

r3mix.net recommends encoding at 256 kbit/s with LAME or Fraunhofer for the best quality. If you think that you can hear the difference between the original CD and the MP3s encoded at 256 kbit/s with either LAME or Fraunhofer I suggest you read the quality section at r3mix.net

Continue reading on the next pages for the configuration and usage of those compressors in Exact Audio Copy.

Other compressors

Of course you are not limited to using the mentioned compressors. Therefore I'll explain the settings on the Waveform and External Compression tab which you need to know if you want to use another compressor.

Wave format: Windows supports different compression techniques in its WAV format. The compression is done by codecs which can be added or removed easily to the system if new compression formats arise. EAC itself also wraps some compression DLLs, so they look like a Codec (e.g. LAME DLL, BladeEnc DLL).
Sample format: Here you can select the sample rate, the resolution and often the compression ratio of the final audio file. The resolution of the CD is 16 bit and the sample rate is 44100 Hz in order to preserve audio CD quality.
Add ID3 tag: The MP3 format has a special feature, it is able to store the artist, composer, etc. behind the actual file, so that most MP3 player will read and display this information. By selecting this option a tag will be added after extraction.
Do not write WAV header to file: For some files (e.g. MP3) Windows provides a Codec to read WAV files, but the format itself should/can not be wrapped by a WAV header. So if you want to create .mp3 files, you should activate this option and specify that extension below.
High quality (slow): Some of the Windows Codecs support the quality settings, they will compress with higher quality.
Low quality (fast): Some of the Windows Codecs support the quality settings, they will compress with higher speed.
File extension for headerless files: If having selected the Do not write WAV header to file option, you are able to specify any filename extension. On MP3 compression you would probably use the string .mp3 in this control.

Use external program for compression: EAC is able to use so called command-line encoders. These encoder packages usually comes as an .EXE file that have to be started with the audio filenames and a bunch of options in a dos box. EAC will call these encoders automatically and pass them the appropriate parameters.
Parameter passing scheme: There are many command-line encoder out there. Nearly each of it requires a special format how the parameters are passed to the program. Here you should select a scheme matching your encoder, or a scheme that is compatible with your encoder.
Program, including path used for compression: Here you have to specify the location and the name of the .EXE file of your encoder.
Additional command line options: If you know the command line parameters and want to add some parameters, in order to use new features or different quality settings you could specify them in this control. The settings you specify here will override the other settings.
Bitrate: Here you could select a bitrate compression ratio for the encoded file.
Delete WAV after compression: EAC have to extract the audio tracks uncompressed to harddisk first in order to pass the filename to the encoder. It is possible to keep that uncompressed file beside the compressed one, or to delete the uncompressed one.
Use CRC check: Some encoders support to store a checksum within the audio file in order to be able to check the consistency of the file on playing, etc. By enabling the encoder will write a CRC checksum, but beware as most encoders so far have a bug that calculates the wrong checksum which resulted in players that will ignore the CRC field.
Add ID3 tag: The MP3 format has a special feature, it is able to store the artist, composer, etc. behind the actual file, so that most MP3 player will read and display this information. By selecting this option a tag will be added after extraction.
High quality: Some of the encoders support the quality settings, they will compress with higher quality.
Low quality: Some of the encoders support the quality settings, they will compress with higher speed.

WAV: NO COMPRESSION

Some may wonder why this tutorial discusses the configuring of extracting to WAV files (no compression) as this is EAC's default and is preconfigured. Well, the reason is that when you've used a compressor for a long time and then some day need to extract to WAV again, some people might have forgotten the original settings. So here they are.

From The EAC menu select Compression Options or press F11. This opens the Compression options window in which you can configure EAC to use compression.

Before we choose and configure the actual compressor a few general options are left to set in the Compression options. Select the Offset tab.

Make sure Use external program for compression is disabled on the External Compression tab. Otherwise you are not able to select the WAV codec. Then on the Waveform tab select Internal WAV Routines from the Wave format drop down box. This sets EAC to WAV output. If everything goes right the Sample format dropdown box should display 44.100 Hz; 16 Bit; Stereo. The Do not write WAV header to file checkbox should be unchecked and the other options greyed out. See the screenshot on the left for the correct configuration.

When you are sure the settings match click the OK button. EAC is now configured to extract to uncompressed WAV files. See Extracting Tracks To Your Harddisk for more information about this.

MP3: LAME EXE

Important: This tutorial hasn't been updated in a while. The LAME version and settings for LAME described on this page are outdated. It's strongly recommended that you follow the LAME configuration tutorial from Chris Myden. On that page start reading from 'Now on to downloading our encoder of choice, LAME'.

MP3 compression is probably the most popular format ever for sharing audio over the Internet. MP3 has become so popular that manufacturers already started making stand alone MP3 players so you can listen to your favorite MP3s even without a computer nearby. The music industry tries to bring down MP3 as being illegal which is absolutely not true! MP3 is here, and it is here to stay. That is until a much better compression format arrives of course :)

In this part of the tutorial we will use the LAME external encoder.

Original started as LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder, a patch to the ISO encoder to avoid legality issues with Fraunhofer LAME has evolved to one of the best MP3 encoders available. In many tests LAME comes out as best and surpasses Fraunhofer which has been the reference encoder for years. At r3mix.net you can find comparisons & tests between LAME and other popular encoders. LAME comes out as the best and thus is LAME the preferred MP3 encoder if quality is your goal. LAME supports both constant bitrate encoding and variable bitrate encoding, and is very fast too. LAME is distributed as source code only, but some sites offer compiled versions. The latest win32 compiled binaries can be found at Dmitry Kutsanov's website.

LAME comes as an executable (EXE) and a Dynamic Linked Library (DLL). While both give identical output, the executable version of LAME is preferred because EAC has the ability to pass custom parameters to the executable allowing you to make use of all of LAME's parameters. The DLL can only use a few predefined settings.

Obtain the LAME external encoder

As said earlier LAME is distributed as source code. Now for most people source code is useless, but you can get the latest win32 compiled binaries at Dmitry Kutsanov's website. 

At the moment of writing LAME 3.90 alpha is the latest r3mix.net recommended version. Download LAME 3.90a. Check Dmitry Kutsanov's website regularly for new updates of the encoder! The latest 3.90 alpha version can be found under 'alpha' versions and is contrary to the stable versions not named with its version number, but with the compilation date. For example lame-20010918 (09/18/2001). After downloading the zip file, decompress lame.exe to your harddisk using WinZip or similar. It's recommended to put lame.exe in the c:windowscommand folder on a Windows 95/98/ME system, and c:winntsystem32 on Windows NT/2000 systems. Why? Files put in these directories can be accessed from every directory on your system. Thus you don't have to change the path to LAME's location every time you want to use it from the command prompt.

If you already had installed the LAME executable and want to find out its version, open a command prompt and type lame, followed by a press on the Enter key. Note that if you did not put LAME in the above mentioned folders you'll have to set the path to lame.exe first! The output of LAME should look like the screenshot below.

The version used in this example is thus LAME version 3.87 (beta 1, Sep 29 2000).

Configuring EAC for the LAME external encoder

Make sure you have Configured The Compression Options in Exact Audio Copy.

From The EAC menu select Compression Options or press F11. This opens the Compression options window.

On the External Compression tab, check Use external program for compression. The settings on the Waveform tab have no influence and may thus be ignored. From the Parameter passing scheme dropdown box choose LAME MP3 Encoder.

In the Program, including path, used for compression field enter the path to the LAME executable or use the Browse button to locate lame.exe on your harddisk.

Enable the Delete WAV after compression checkbox. Exact Audio Copy always extracts to WAV first when using an external compressor. Enabling this option deletes this WAV file after it is compressed. It does not make much sense to keep the WAV files after compression.

Use CRC check should be disabled. While LAME is one of the few encoders which actually support the CRC check correctly it has little use. Because most encoders' implementation of this feature is not working correctly, most players ignore the CRC check. Besides that, enabling this option adds 16 bits (the CRC value) to every MP3 frame!

Enable Add ID3 tag if you want to take advantage of the ID3 tag features. The ID3 tag saves extra information like artist name, track title, album title into the MP3 file. The newer ID3v2 tag (which is also supported by EAC - see Configuring The Compression Options) can store even more extra information and gets rid of ID3v1's 30 characters limitation.

The High quality and Low quality radio buttons are defaulted to High quality, but we'll override these settings so they have no effect.

Setting the LAME encoding options

LAME can be configured in EAC by selecting the bitrate from the Bit rate drop down box. However, in this tutorial we will override these predefined settings and use our own custom commands to get optimal control of the settings. LAME supports virtually unlimited parameter combinations and it is not the goal of this tutorial to test all combinations and determine which one gives the best results. Luckily that's not necessary since other people already did this for us. r3mix.net is the place to be when it comes to MP3 encoder quality. r3mix.net has done extensive tests with the LAME encoder and defined the optimal settings for the best quality. These are the settings we will use in this tutorial too.

LAME supports both Constant Bitrate encoding (CBR) as Variable Bitrate encoding (VBR). CBR encoding uses the same bitrate in every frame through the whole file. VBR on the other hand changes the bitrate of every frame according to the complexity of the audio data in that frame. Complex signals will force LAME to use a higher bitrate, while simple signals force LAME to use a lower bitrate to save space. VBR encoded files can have the same quality as a CBR encoded file while the file size is a lot smaller. You can say that Variable Bitrate encoding is the more efficient one. The drawback of Variable Bitrate encoding is that it is way slower to encode, and not all players and decoders (correctly) support it. Therefore, if file size is no issue for you avoid VBR and use Constant Bitrate encoding instead. With the prices of storage media these days, file size shouldn't be an issue for most people.

Important LAME parameters

In this small section I'll discuss the most important and common used LAME parameters. LAME has a lot more parameters you can use. For more information read the Usage document that comes with the LAME distribution.

• -b n: Set constant bitrate (bitrate: n = 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 80, 96, 112, 128, 160, 192, 224, 256, 320 kbit/s). The higher the bitrate, the higher the quality.
• -V m -b n: Enable variable bitrate encoding (variable bitrate encoding quality: m = 0, 1, , 9) and set the minimum allowed bitrate (bitrate: n = 8, 16, 24, , 320 kbit/s). This minimum allowed bitrate is useful to prevent LAME VBR from using some very aggressive compression which can cause some distortion due to small flaws in the psycho-acoustic model.
  The lower the variable bitrate encoding quality number, the higher the quality of the encoded file. Thus a variable bitrate encoding quality number closer to 0 will force LAME to encode at a higher quality (use bitrates above the minimum allowed).
• -m n: Set stereo mode used by LAME (stereo mode: n = m (mono), n = s (stereo), n = j (joint stereo) and n = f (forced mid/side stereo)).
  Mono is the default mode for mono input files. If -m m is specified for a stereo input file, the two channels will be averaged into a mono signal.
  Joint stereo or jstereo is the default mode for stereo files with fixed bitrates of 160 kbit/s or less. At higher fixed bitrates, the default is stereo. For VBR encoding, jstereo is the default for VBR quality > 4, and stereo is the default for VBR quality <= 4. You can override all of these defaults by specifying the mode on the command-line.
  Jstereo means the encoder can use (on a frame by frame bases) either regular stereo (just encode left and right channels independently) or mid/side stereo. In mid/side stereo, the mid (L+R) and side (L-R) channels are encoded, and more bits are allocated to the mid channel than the side channel. This will effectively increase the bandwidth if the signal does not have too much stereo separation.
  Mid/side stereo is basically a trick to increase bandwidth. At 128 kbit/s, it is clearly worth while. At higher bitrates it is less useful.
  Using mid/side stereo inappropriately can result in audible compression artifacts. To much switching between mid/side and regular stereo can also sound bad. To determine when to switch to mid/side stereo, LAME uses a much more sophisticated algorithm than that described in the ISO documentation.
  Forced mid/side stereo forces all frames to be encoded mid/side stereo. It should only be used if you are sure every frame of the input file has very little stereo separation.
• -h: Enables specialized mid/side masking thresholds to be used in jstereo mode. Will sound better in jstereo mode but is about 20% slower. -h also enables a more accurate but slightly slower quantization formula. Since high quality is our goal, this parameter should always be used.

High quality Constant Bitrate encoding settings

LAME 3.87

r3mix.net recommends 256 kbit/s high quality stereo encoding. Translating this to LAME parameters it gives -b 256 -m s -h. Thus enter this -b 256 -m s -h in the Additional command line options field. See the screenshot on the left for an example. Also note that we don't use EAC's Bit rate dropdown box to specify the bitrate. Putting -b 256 in the Additional command line options will override the settings of this dropdown box.

LAME 3.88 and 3.89

For LAME 3.88 and 3.89 r3mix.net recommends -b 256 -m s -h --lowpass 19.5.

LAME 3.90a (recommended)

For LAME 3.90a r3mix.net recommends -b 256 -m s -q 0 --lowpass 19.5.

When uploading to newsgroups or FTPs 256 kbit/s MP3s are sometimes considered as a little bit overkill. Most people do not hear the difference between 192 kbit/s encoded files and 256 kbit/s. Therefore you may choose to use -b 192 -m s -q 0 --lowpass 19.5 instead. 192 kbit/s is nowadays the preferred bitrate for Internet distribution although Variable Bitrate is gaining popularity very fast and will probably replace the aging 192 kbit/s standard. However, for personal use, or if you just care about quality always go for 256 kbit/s.

High quality Variable Bitrate encoding settings

LAME 3.87

LAME is currently the only MP3 encoder optimally tweaked for Variable Bitrate encoding unlike Fraunhofer and which does not mess up like Xing. For VBR encoding r3mix.net recommends somewhat more advanced settings: -V 1 -b 128 -m j -h -q 1. Joint stereo is used. some people claim that joint stereo is not good. But this only applies to the Fraunhofer and Xing encoder. LAME offers perfect tweaked joint stereo encoding. The extra -q 1 switch is another quality/size switch. It is said to replace the -h switch when using VBR. This is what r3mix.net has to say about it: -q 1 saves you a lot of bits without real quality concessions. I use it with -V 1, and never had a bad experience with it. It makes the encoder rely more on the psycho-acoustics model, yielding less bits for the same quality. There are reports of -q 1 combined with variable bitrate quality parameter -V higher than 4 giving poorer results, but since -V 1 is what I use, not much of a problem I think.
Why not using -V 0 for even higher quality? -V 1 -b 128 -m j gives a perfect balance between quality and space (about 160 to 190 kbit/s). If you use -V 0 (or -m s) you end up with a file of about 220 kbit/s. Due to the imperfect nature of the psycho-acoustic model and quantization algorithms of a perceptual encoder, you can better opt for the safe 256 kbit/s CBR solution if you don't mind ending up with such large files. Using -V 0 does not sound better than a fixed 256 kbit/s encoding as stated in the Lame manual.

Enter this -V 1 -b 128 -m j -h -q 1 in the Additional command line options field. See the screenshot on the left for an example.

LAME 3.88 and 3.89

LAME 3.88 and 3.89 are for variable bitrate a lot slower than the previous versions (using the new settings of course), but its quality is much better according to the experts. For LAME 3.88 r3mix.net recommends --r3mix -b 112. This equals to -V 1 -m j -h --athtype 3 --lowpass 19.5 -b 112.

LAME 3.90a (recommended)

LAME 3.90a has many quality and speed enhancements over the previous versions. Therefore it's recommended to use this version, especially when encoding Variable Bitrate MP3s. For LAME 3.90a r3mix.net recommends --r3mix. This equals to --nspsytune --vbr-mtrh -V1 -mj -h -b96 --lowpass 19.5 --athtype 3 --ns-sfb21 2 -Z --scale 0.98. For an explanation of all those switches see the Quality page at r3mix.net.

Variable Bitrate encoding is getting more and more popular for distributing files over the Internet. With the correct settings (see above) its quality is identical to high quality Constant Bitrate encoding (-b 256 -m s -q 0 --lowpass 19.5), but the file size is a lot smaller - modem friendlier! The disadvantage of VBR is that certain older MP3 players or hardware decoders are not able to play the files or give incorrect time indication. Also encoding to VBR takes a lot longer than CBR However, for Internet distribution VBR is the way to go!

When you are sure the settings are correct for your needs click the OK button. EAC is now configured to extract to high quality MP3 files. See Extracting Tracks To Your Harddisk for more information about this.

MP3: LAME DLL

MP3 compression is probably the most popular format ever for sharing audio over the Internet. MP3 has become so popular that manufacturers already started making stand alone MP3 players so you can listen to your favorite MP3s even without a computer nearby. The music industry tries to bring down MP3 as being illegal which is absolutely not true! MP3 is here, and it is here to stay. That is until a much better compression format arrives of course :)

In this part of the tutorial we will use the LAME DLL encoder.

For people reading the whole tutorial at once several parts on this page will be familiar already. It's just copy/pasted from the external LAME encoder part of the tutorial. I didn't feel liking writing a whole new story about it. I could of course leave it away and put links to the external LAME encoder part of the tutorial to clarify things, but some people are too lazy to check those out and then bug me with stupid e-mails complaining about missing information.

Original started as LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder, a patch to the ISO encoder to avoid legality issues with Fraunhofer LAME has evolved to one of the best MP3 encoders available. In many tests LAME comes out as best and surpasses Fraunhofer which has been the reference encoder for years. At r3mix.net you can find comparisons & tests between LAME and other popular encoders. LAME comes out as the best and thus is LAME the preferred MP3 encoder if quality is your goal. LAME supports both constant bitrate encoding and variable bitrate encoding, and is very fast too. LAME is distributed as source code only, but some sites offer compiled versions. The latest win32 compiled binaries can be found at Dmitry Kutsanov's website.

LAME comes as an executable (EXE) and a Dynamic Linked Library (DLL). While both give identical output, the executable version of LAME is preferred because EAC has the ability to pass custom parameters to the executable allowing you to make use of all of LAME's parameters. The DLL can only use a few predefined settings. Anyway, for most people those predefined settings satisfy so I'll explain the usage of the DLL here. If you want a more configurable LAME encoder use the external executable version of LAME. The advantage of the DLL is real-time encoding. The external encoder has to wait for a track to be extracted completely to WAV first before the encoding can begin. DLL based encoders or codecs can encode in real time without extracting to a temporary WAV first.

Important:

Since LAME 3.88 r3mix.net recommends a LAME command-line using advanced parameters which EAC cannot pass to the LAME DLL. Therefore you better use the external executable version of LAME. 

Obtain the LAME DLL encoder

As said earlier LAME is distributed as source code. Now for most people source code is useless, but you can get the latest win32 compiled binaries at Dmitry Kutsanov's website. 

At the moment of writing LAME 3.89 is the latest version. Download LAME 3.89. Check Dmitry Kutsanov's website regularly for new updates of the encoder! After downloading the zip file, decompress lame_enc.dll to your harddisk using WinZip or similar. It's recommended to put lame.exe in the c:windowssystem folder on a Windows 95/98/ME system, and c:winntsystem32 on Windows NT/2000 systems. Why? Then the LAME DLL can be shared between other programs supporting the DLL. If you do not ant to put LAME in the mentioned directories you must place it in the same directory as the Exact Audio Copy executable eac.exe. Otherwise EAC will not be able to detect lame_enc.dll.

Configuring EAC for the LAME DLL encoder

Make sure you have Configured The Compression Options in Exact Audio Copy.

From The EAC menu select Compression Options or press F11. This opens the Compression options window.

Make sure Use external program for compression is disabled on the External Compression tab. Otherwise you are not able to select the LAME DLL encoder. Then on the Waveform tab select LAME MPEG Layer-3 Encoder v3.87 DLL v1.16 from the Wave format drop down box. Depending on your version of the DLL the version and build information may differ. Also note that a new tab has appeared in the Compression options window: the LAME DLL tab. If you cannot see this new tab and cannot select the LAME DLL from the dropdown box, lame_enc.dll is probably not at the correct location.

Enable Add ID3 tag if you want to take advantage of the ID3 tag features. The ID3 tag saves extra information like artist name, track title, album title into the MP3 file. The newer ID3v2 tag (which is also supported by EAC - see Configuring The Compression Options) can store even more extra information and gets rid of ID3v1's 30 characters limitation.

Check Do not write WAV header to file to avoid the writing of a WAV header. MP3 cannot be wrapped by a WAV header. Therefore this option must be enabled.

Enter .mp3 in the File extension for headerless files. Note the dot (point) before the extension. It is necessary to put the dot in front of the letters mp3.

On the LAME DLL tab make sure Insert CRC Checksum is disabled. While LAME is one of the few encoders which actually supports the CRC check correctly it has little use. Because most encoders' implementation of this feature is not working correctly, most players ignore the CRC check. Besides that, enabling this option adds 16 bits (the CRC value) to every MP3 frame!

The Write Xing VBR header on VBR encoding should be enabled. For most people knowing something about MP3 quality the name Xing gives them pimples and is associated with low quality MP3s. But if Xing invents a good thing it may be said. The Xing header helps MP3 players to identify a file as a Variable Bitrate file. It will of course only be written to Variable Bitrate files.

Setting the LAME encoding options

LAME can be configured in EAC by selecting the bitrate from the Sample format drop down box on the Waveform tab. Unlike with the highly configurable external executable version of LAME, there is no possibility of overriding these settings with custom parameters. As mentioned before we will use the r3mix.net recommended settings for MP3 encoding. r3mix.net has done extensive tests with the LAME encoder and defined the optimal settings for the best quality.

LAME supports both Constant Bitrate encoding (CBR) as Variable Bitrate encoding (VBR). CBR encoding uses the same bitrate in every frame through the whole file. VBR on the other hand changes the bitrate of every frame according to the complexity of the audio data in that frame. Complex signals will force LAME to use a higher bitrate, while simple signals force LAME to use a lower bitrate to save space. VBR encoded files can have the same quality as a CBR encoded file while the file size is a lot smaller. You can say that Variable Bitrate encoding is the more efficient one. The drawback of Variable Bitrate encoding is that it is way slower to encode, and not all players and decoders (correctly) support it. Therefore, if file size is no issue for you avoid VBR and use Constant Bitrate encoding instead. With the prices of storage media these days, file size shouldn't be an issue for most people.

Important LAME parameters

In this small section I'll discuss the most important and common used LAME parameters. LAME has a lot more parameters you can use but the DLL implementation in Exact Audio Copy does not allow to use those. The parameters passed to LAME are also shown below, but you cannot see those. It's all wrapped in a nice user interface.

• Sample format: In this drop down box you can specify the bitrate. -b n: Set constant bitrate (bitrate: n = 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 80, 96, 112, 128, 160, 192, 224, 256, 320 kbit/s). The higher the bitrate, the higher the quality.
  Below the CBR bitrates in the drop down box you can find the VBR settings. If you want to use Variable Bitrate encoding you must select one of the bitrates with VBR in the name. When using VBR, the selected bitrate is the minimum allowed bitrate. This is useful to prevent LAME VBR from using some very aggressive compression which can cause some distortion due to small flaws in the psycho-acoustic model.
• Output mode: In this drop down box you can select the stereo mode used by LAME. -m n: Set stereo mode (stereo mode: n = m (mono), n = s (stereo), n = j (joint stereo) and n = f (forced mid/side stereo)).
  Mono is the default mode for mono input files. If -m m is specified for a stereo input file, the two channels will be averaged into a mono signal.
  Joint stereo or jstereo is the default mode for stereo files with fixed bitrates of 160 kbit/s or less. At higher fixed bitrates, the default is stereo. For VBR encoding, jstereo is the default for VBR quality > 4, and stereo is the default for VBR quality <= 4. You can override all of these defaults by specifying the mode on the command-line.
  Jstereo means the encoder can use (on a frame by frame bases) either regular stereo (just encode left and right channels independently) or mid/side stereo. In mid/side stereo, the mid (L+R) and side (L-R) channels are encoded, and more bits are allocated to the mid channel than the side channel. This will effectively increase the bandwidth if the signal does not have too much stereo separation.
  Mid/side stereo is basically a trick to increase bandwidth. At 128 kbit/s, it is clearly worth while. At higher bitrates it is less useful.
  Using mid/side stereo inappropriately can result in audible compression artifacts. To much switching between mid/side and regular stereo can also sound bad. To determine when to switch to mid/side stereo, LAME uses a much more sophisticated algorithm than that described in the ISO documentation.
  Forced mid/side stereo forces all frames to be encoded mid/side stereo. It should only be used if you are sure every frame of the input file has very little stereo separation.
• Quality: In this drop down box the encoding quality can be set. Since the best quality is what we need only set this to High Quality. -h: Enables specialized mid/side masking thresholds to be used in jstereo mode. Will sound better in jstereo mode but is about 20% slower. -h also enables a more accurate but slightly slower quantization formula. Since high quality is our goal, this parameter should always be used.
• Maximum VBR bitrate: Here you can specify the maximum bitrate used by Variable Bitrate encoding. -B n: Set maximum allowed bitrate (bitrate: n = 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 80, 96, 112, 128, 160, 192, 224, 256, 320 kbit/s). The higher the bitrate, the higher bitrates can be used and thus the higher the quality. By default LAME uses the maximum of 320 kbit/s as highest allowed bitrate. For high quality encoding it is not recommended to lower this value!
• Use VBR quality: The lower the variable bitrate encoding quality number, the higher the quality of the encoded file. Thus a variable bitrate encoding quality number closer to 0 will force LAME to encode at a higher quality (use bitrates above the minimum allowed). -V m (variable bitrate encoding quality: m = 0, 1, , 9) and set the minimum allowed bitrate (bitrate: n = 8, 16, 24, , 320 kbit/s).

High quality Constant Bitrate encoding settings

r3mix.net recommends 256 kbit/s high quality stereo encoding. See the screenshots on the left for an example.

When uploading to newsgroups or FTPs 256 kbit/s MP3s are sometimes considered as a little bit overkill. Most people do not hear the difference between 192 kbit/s encoded files and 256 kbit/s. Therefore you may choose to use -b 192 -m s -h instead. 192 kbit/s is nowadays the preferred bitrate for Internet distribution. However, for personal use, or if you just care about quality always go for 256 kbit/s.

High quality Variable Bitrate encoding settings

LAME is currently the only MP3 encoder optimally tweaked for Variable Bitrate encoding unlike Fraunhofer and which does not mess up like Xing. For VBR encoding r3mix.net recommends somewhat more advanced settings: -V 1 -b 128 -m j -h -q 1. Now here's the problem with the DLL. The -q 1 switch cannot be used when using the DLL. That is the reason why I do not recommend the usage of the LAME DLL for Variable Bitrate encoding. You better use the external executable version of LAME. The extra -q 1 switch is another quality/size switch. It is said to replace the -h switch when using VBR. This is what r3mix.net has to say about it: -q 1 saves you a lot of bits without real quality concessions. I use it with -V 1, and never had a bad experience with it. It makes the encoder rely more on the psycho-acoustics model, yielding less bits for the same quality. There are reports of -q 1 combined with variable bitrate quality parameter -V higher than 4 giving poorer results, but since -V 1 is what I use, not much of a problem I think.

The closest to r3mix.net's settings you can get is -V 1 -b 128 -m j -h. Joint stereo is used. some people claim that joint stereo is not good. But this only applies to the Fraunhofer and Xing encoder. LAME offers perfect tweaked joint stereo encoding. Why not using -V 0 for even higher quality? -V 1 -b 128 -m j gives a perfect balance between quality and space (about 160 to 190 kbit/s). If you use -V 0 (or -m s) you end up with a file of about 220 kbit/s. Due to the imperfect nature of the psycho-acoustic model and quantization algorithms of a perceptual encoder, you can better opt for the safe 256 kbit/s CBR solution if you don't mind ending up with such large files. Using -V 0 does not sound better than a fixed 256 kbit/s encoding as stated in the Lame manual.

See the screenshot on the left for an example of using the -V 1 -b 128 -m j -h setting.

When you are sure the settings are correct for your needs click the OK button. EAC is now configured to extract to high quality MP3 files. See Extracting Tracks To Your Harddisk for more information about

MP3: FRAUNHOFER CODEC

MP3 compression is probably the most popular format ever for sharing audio over the Internet. MP3 has become so popular that manufacturers already started making stand alone MP3 players so you can listen to your favorite MP3s even without a computer nearby. The music industry tries to bring down MP3 as being illegal which is absolutely not true! MP3 is here, and it is here to stay. That is until a much better compression format arrives of course :)

In this part of the tutorial we will use the Fraunhofer IIS MPEG Layer-3 Codec (professional).

In 1987, the Fraunhofer IIS-A started to work on a perceptual audio coding in the framework of the EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB). In a joint cooperation with the University of Erlangen, the Fraunhofer IIS-A finally devised a very powerful algorithm that is standardized as ISO-MPEG Audio Layer-3 (IS 11172-3 and IS 13818-3). This revolutionary compression standard became popular under the name MP3. MP3 was the first compression standard that could provide near CD quality at a decent compression ratio. Through the years the psycho-acoustic model of the Fraunhofer encoders has improved providing even better quality.

The Fraunhofer codec used here is version 1.263 with Radium hack. Not Fraunhofer's latest but without doubt their best encoder to date. The newer Fraunhofer codecs offer better Variable Bitrate performance, but their output quality is lower than the good old 1.263. Avoid 'em! Nowadays Fraunhofer is surpassed in both quality and speed by LAME. When it comes to Variable Bitrate encoding you better forget about Fraunhofer. It's just not on par with LAME. If you really want the best encoder you better read the LAME part of this tutorial. What Fraunhofer excels in is low bitrate encoding. At bitrates of 128 kbit/s and lower no other encoder can beat Fraunhofer. However, our goal is creating high bitrate (thus higher quality) MP3 files.

Obtain the Fraunhofer codec

The Fraunhofer Professional codec is unlike LAME not open source freeware (yet another reason to use LAME). Therefore I cannot provide a download location (and don't mail me for one). Anyway, for a seasoned Internet user it shouldn't cost too much effort to find the Radium enhanced Fraunhofer 1.263 codec.

Configuring EAC for the Fraunhofer codec

Make sure you have Configured The Compression Options in Exact Audio Copy.

From The EAC menu select Compression Options or press F11. This opens the Compression options window.

Make sure Use external program for compression is disabled on the External Compression tab. Otherwise you are not able to select the Fraunhofer codec. Then on the Waveform tab select Fraunhofer IIS MPEG Layer-3 Codec (professional) from the Wave format drop down box.

Enable Add ID3 tag if you want to take advantage of the ID3 tag features. The ID3 tag saves extra information like artist name, track title, album title into the MP3 file. The newer ID3v2 tag (which is also supported by EAC - see Configuring The Compression Options) can store even more extra information and gets rid of ID3v1's 30 characters limitation.

Check Do not write WAV header to file to avoid the writing of a WAV header. MP3 cannot be wrapped by a WAV header. Therefore this option must be enabled.

Enter .mp3 in the File extension for headerless files. Note the dot (point) before the extension. It is necessary to put the dot in front of the letters mp3.

Setting the Fraunhofer encoding options for high quality constant bitrate encoding

Fraunhofer can be configured in EAC by selecting the bitrate from the Sample format drop down box on the Waveform tab. As mentioned before we will use the r3mix.net recommended settings for MP3 encoding. r3mix.net has done extensive tests with MP3 encoders and defined the optimal settings for the best quality.

r3mix.net recommends 256 kbit/s high quality stereo encoding. See the screenshots on the left for an example. Fraunhofer uses stereo mode encoding by default at 256 kbit/s.

When uploading to newsgroups or FTPs 256 kbit/s MP3s are sometimes considered as a little bit overkill. Most people do not hear the difference between 192 kbit/s encoded files and 256 kbit/s. Therefore you may choose to use 192 kbit/s instead. Note that Fraunhofer will use joint stereo at bitrates of 192 kbit/s and lower. You'll have to change the Fraunhofer settings if you want to use the preferred stereo mode. In Windows 2000 (sorry, no 95/98/ME here) that can be done via Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Sounds and Multimedia -> Hardware -> Audio Codecs -> Properties -> Properties -> Fraunhofer IIS MPEG Layer-3 Codec -> Properties -> Settings

192 kbit/s is nowadays the preferred bitrate for Internet distribution. However, for personal use, or if you just care about quality always go for 256 kbit/s.

When you are sure the settings are correct for your needs click the OK button. EAC is now configured to extract to high quality MP3 files. See Extracting Tracks To Your Harddisk for more information about this.