How to rip your CDs to FLAC

Introduction

Ripping CDs is, believe it or not, a fine art, and it’s changed massively since the gilded years of squeezing 128kbps MP3 files onto limited storage. The design isn’t ‘small and safe enough’ anymore – it’s close to making the absolute best quality copy possible.

Many audio CD ripping packages perform a small correction for jitter, which serves to cut the impact of scratches or dust when reading the track, but you’ll need to take heed to these tracks back with a careful ear – that correction can potentially leave imperfections in your path.

Exact Audio Copy, our pick for best CD ripper does things a bit differently. It does jitter correction, and also verifies the ripped audio against the original path to determine consistency, as well as performing multiple scans to insure an exact duplication. It’s superb – but EAC can take a bit of setting up before you’ll bring the best out of it.

Legality

A quick note on the law: ripping is, depending where you are in the world, a practice of questionable legal standing. In the US there’s no legal precedent that states whether you are or are not allowed to space-shift your tunes from one form of media (ie CDs) to another (ie MP3 players).

In Australia, you’re good to go: the law says you’re entitled to get a transcript of the media you own as long as you don’t disperse it.

In Europe, the law varies a little, state by state, but in the main governments compensates rights holders directly for perceived losses if they legally allow their citizens to duplicate media for personal purpose.

In the UK, despite a brief period of explicit legality, the High Court has made ripping CDs illegal. So don’t do it.

1. Get Exact Audio Copy

Let’s start, as ever, with the easy bit: head over to www.exactaudiocopy.de and use the Download link on the left to find the EAC download, making sure to click the appropriate flag if you don’t desire to download the German variant.

Embark on the installer and click through until you’re afforded the choice to pick out individual portions, then deselect GD3. It’s a decent service, but we’ve so far to come across someone whose CD ripping exploits are worth US$8 to access just about metadata. Click Install when you’re done.

2. Run the wizard

Open Exact Audio Copy for the first time and you’ll need to run through a quick configuration wizard. If you have more than one optical drive, you can pick which one you’ll use for disc ripping (if not all of them) an EAC will configure itself appropriately.

Obviously, you’ll want to make sure ‘accurate results’ is selected rather than the speedier option. When EAC asks you to insert a disc to check your drive’s accuracy, you’ll probably jump to the next step...

3. Configure AccurateRip

If all has gone to plan, you’ll see a dialog leap on top of the wizard that asks if you want AccurateRip to run through its configuration process – this is the comparison engine that ensures your rips are the same as those from others worldwide. Click ‘Configure’.

It’s likely that AccurateRip will now ask for further discs to verify that the information it’s worked out about your drive’s laser offset is correct. Catch a few more records and insert them as instructed, and try not to get infuriated if AccurateRip rejects them.

4. Back to the wizard

With AccurateRip happy, leave a disc in the thrust and allow the wizard to go forward. It’ll flow through your disc, looking into your optical drive’s features as it fares so, to determine the drive’s suitability for accurate ripping. If our experience is anything to go by, it may too appear to crash, simply impart it a couple of minutes and the test should complete without a limp. Ideally you’re looking for accurate ripping to be a ‘yes’ and caching to be a ‘no’ on the results screen.

Go along a few pages and you’re offered your choice of ripping formats: we’d recommend FLAC as opposed to any others, and you’ll even be able to write raw uncompressed WAV files if you prefer.

SEE MORE: HOW TO SECURELY LOCK AND HIDE FILES & FOLDERS WITH FOLDER LOCK

5. More wizarding

Further on, you’ll be asked for an email address to use metadata provider freedb; this doesn’t have to be a real address, and you don’t need to register, so insert something here if you want your tracks automatically labeled from that source – there are also several others, like CueTools DB, that can provide the relevant details.

Next you can select your track naming scheme from a long list. Choose what looks right to you. Finally, the big one: are you a beginner, or are you an expert? Leave EAC on beginner mode for now – if you become serious about your reps, you can switch on the entire slew of features later on.

6. More options

Head to EAC > Compression Options and open the External Compressor tab. FLAC should be selected and, all being well, set up by default. Click the 'Test Encoder' button to check that all is working; this will also set the Bitrate box appropriately. Observe that this creates no difference to the eventual rip – it’s a logical value used during the ripping operation.

At once, select everything in the ‘Additional command-line options’ box and paste the following parameters as-is:

-8 -V -T "ARTIST=%artist%" -T "TITLE=%title%" -T "ALBUM=%albumtitle%" -T "DATE=%year%" -T "TRACKNUMBER=%tracknr%" -T "GENRE=%genre%" -T "PERFORMER=%albuminterpret%" -T "COMPOSER=%composer%" %haslyrics%–tag-from-file=LYRICS="%lyricsfile%"%haslyrics% -T "ALBUMARTIST=%albumartist%" -T "DISCNUMBER=%cdnumber%" -T "TOTALDISCS=%totalcds%" -T "TOTALTRACKS=%numtracks%" -T "COMMENT=%comment%" %source% -o %dest%

This should insure that your ripped tracks are done so with the maximum of usable data. Click OK when you’re done.

7. Time to rip

Let’s turn a disc into some FLAC files. Along the master interface, click the blue CD icon with the red plush on the top bar to pull in data about your magnetic disk – all being well, it’ll get the album name, cover art and the like, though if the platter has been released several times you’ll want to pick the right version for accuracy.

With that all set, click the button labeled ‘CMP’ on the left hand side of the main interface to build a compressed rip, in FLAC format. Don’t be worried about the status window mentioning .wav files at the top – files are automatically ripped in WAV format, converted to FLAC, and then the original files are erased from your automobile.

8. Check the results

When ripping is complete, you’ll be presented with a report, first from AccurateRip (if you’ve managed to find enough discs to configure it) and then, if you’ve ripped a whole disc rather than a choice of trails, from Cue Tools DB. Both of will (hopefully) confirm the flawless results of your rake.

If anything suspicious has cropped up, you can apply the ‘Review tracks’ button to hear the parts of the audio that EAC isn’t entirely happy with, and re-rip if you select.

9. Don't do this

In one case you’ve ripped your first record, it’s time to tinker with a few options to make the results precisely as you require them. The majority of the interesting settings is found in EAC > EAC Options; check the Extraction tab to automatically delete blocks of silence (not 100% precise, but potentially more convenient if you’re using a hires portable player) or to automatically cool down your driveway and then it keeps running with top performance.

You can even, in the Normalize tab, pull the levels of your audio together, taking in the quiet bits louder and the loud bit quieter. But don’t. Normalization is fine for spoken word discs, only it’s almost the toughest thing you can get along to a music track.