Date: Feb 3, 2003
Category: Software
Author(s): Workin'

OK - so you have a brand-spanking new portable MP3 player, and a giant stack of audio CD's you've collected since about 1980. How do you get the music off the CD and into the MP3 format?

It's a 2-step process:

1. Copy the music from the CD, then
2. Convert the copied music to the MP3 format

This FAQ covers the first step, with a few pointers for the second. See this FAQ for more information about encoding MP3's.

The process of copying the songs from an audio CD is called "Digital Audio Extraction", or DAE for short. Because the music is copied from the CD in its digital form (i.e., as data rather than music), DAE has also become known as "ripping", because you are just ripping the bits from the disc, not converting them to an analog signal. This process can yield perfect, bit-for-bit copies of the original source. Or not, depending on how DAE is accomplished.

The music data on an audio CD is written in a much less stringent format than regular computer data. There is almost no error correction capability built in to the audio CD data structure. The upside is that approximately 750MB of audio can be written to a CD-R that will only hold about 650MB of computer data. The downside is that the music is more vulnerable to read errors during playback. Which is usually no problem because the algorithm used by a CD player to convert the music from a digital to analog stream is capable of "filling in" some pretty large gaps in the data. It IS a problem when it comes to DAE, however. Since the bits are being read directly to a file, they are not processed by a player's error-correction circuitry, so any read errors will show up as audible defects in the extracted file - things like clicks, or pops, or just silence. Which can be annoying when you play them back as WAV or MP3 files.

In the "olden days" computer CD-ROM drives weren't capable of reading audio data directly from a CD. Luckily, those days are gone. Today, just about every drive that can read a data CD can also extract digital audio. Some do it better than others, but for the most part the drive is not a huge factor.

There are many programs out there that "do" DAE. Some cost money, some are free. Today is our lucky day, because the best DAE program for Windows also happens to be a free DAE program -- Exact Audio Copy, or EAC. For Linux, cdparanoia is a good choice - but I'm going to stick with Windows, because if you can figure out Linux, you can figure out cdparanoia.

Why is EAC the best "ripper" for Windows? It's the ONLY one that attempts any error correction during DAE. That's the main reason. It's also an excellent "frontend" for MP3 encoding, it can create ID3 tags for your ripped songs, and it can interface with the CDDB database to automatically name and title your extracted files.

Why not use Musicmatch Jukebox or AudioGrabber or some other ripping program? EAC reads the audio data one sector at a time, then reads it again, compares the 2 reads, and if they match, moves to the next one. If the 2 reads of a sector don't match, EAC reads it again and again until 2 reads match - and if that doesn't happen it flags an error for you so you know the rip wasn't perfect. NO other program does this. One drawback is that EAC is slooowww at reading a disc compared to those other programs. Most of the time you won't see rip speeds higher than about 4x using EAC, while the others might report 12x or more. The difference is the other programs just rip the data, don't check it, and don't let you know if there was a problem. Speed or quality, at the moment you can't have both!

Let's get set up - there are 2 or 3 things you'll need to download: EAC, LAME, and maybe an "ASPI layer". If you need the ASPI layer EAC will tell you so. At which point you can go to Adaptec's web site and download and install the ASPI package that is appropriate for the version of Windows you are using.

Follow the instructions that come with EAC and LAME to install them. Then run EAC and see if it complains about you having no ASPI layer or if your CD reader(s) don't show up in the drop-down list - in which case you'll have to download and install Adaptec's ASPI package...

After EAC is running without complaint, and your CD reader shows up in the list, insert an audio CD into the drive, select the drive you are using, and then from the EAC menu choose "Drive Options", click "OK", then click "Detect Read Features". EAC will then determine the best settings to use with your drive.

Next, from the EAC menu choose "Compression Options", click on the "External Compression" tab, check off "Use external program for compression, pick "LAME MP3 encoder" from the "Parameter passing scheme" drop-down, then enter the path to the LAME .exe file you installed, then in the "Additional command line options space type "--%l--alt-preset 128%l%h--alt-preset standard%h %s %d" without the quotes, and click "OK".

Or -- immediately after installing EAC You can run the "Configuration Wizard" from the EAC menu and have everything set up automatically.

You now should have the basic setup for ripping audio CD's and converting them to high-quality MP3's. Of course there is a multitude of options for file naming, CDDB access, ID3 tags, etc. - and you are on your own to figure those out. Be sure to read the FAQ file that comes with EAC, and also check out the mini-tutorial at r3mix.net on their "ripping" page. Also, read the Anandtech FAQ about encoding MP3's, there is lots of info there about settings for the MP3 encoder.

Happy ripping!

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