westgroveg's EAC+FLAC image guide, See wiki for official EAC guides Options

[westgroveg]

I decided to write this thread after not being able to find any standard way of creating an Image compressed with FLAC. This guide is the best way I have found so far, hope it's useful.

1. Open EAC


a. Drive Setup (done once):


. Insert an audio CD into your drive and open EAC

. Click EAC\Drive Options (F10) on the menu bar, select the Extraction Method tab & then press the Detect Read Features.... button

. Wait for EAC to finish analyzing your drive then take a note of your drive's features & press the OK button

. Select: Secure mode with the following drive features (recommended);


Feature: Caching/Drive caches audio

If EAC reports "Caching: Yes" your drive caches audio data, every sector read will be read from cache and is identical, this will increase the probability of errors & cause a speed decrease. EAC needs to clear the cache by overreading it, enable this by ticking the "drive caches audio" box.


Tip: EAC may misinform about audio caching, as an alternative you can use Feurio's audio caching test found in Feurio.exe\Ctrl+Alt+P\Test device\Cache test.

Tip: Some drives disable audio caching at low speeds; if your drive is set to DMA transfer mode, try changing it to PIO only transfer mode, then re-test for caching and set back to DMA mode.


Feature: Accurate Stream/Drive has ‘Accurate Stream’ feature

If EAC reports "Accurate Stream: Yes", you have a decreased probability of errors.


Feature: "C2 Error Info/Drive is capable of retrieving C2 error information"

With C2 enabled, EAC's error detection becomes dependent on the drives C2 accuracy which varies from drive to drive and increases the probability of errors. This feature also results in a speed increase, because EAC doesn't read the data twice anymore. If your drive supports this feature and you decide to use it, enable this by ticking the C2 Error Info box.

Tip: To determine your drives C2 accuracy you could attempt to create a DAE Quality test CD.


Tip: The Coaster Factory, Eac-Audio.de have databases with user reported drive settings, you can use them to determine the appropriate features for your drive.


b. Extraction (done every time you create an image):


. Retrieve CD information or enter it manually, e.g. artist, album, track names (will be present in the CUE Sheet). Check for spelling errors using the original CD booklet/inlay.

. Click Action\Copy Image & create CUE Sheet\Uncompressed (Alt+F7)

. A Save Waveform dialog box will open, input your desired name & press the Save button.


2. Open FLAC Frontend

Tick only:

• Verify (verifies there were no errors during encoding)
• Add tags (Set-up tag conf. fields & set Filename scheme to Custom: X)
• Replaygain (stores replaygain values, doesn't modify the original audio data)
• Cuesheet (Created by EAC, Set full path)
• Delete input files (removes input wave file)

Then press encode.

NEW!
Tip: You can now store CD TEXT within your FLAC image using Foobar; just open your CUE sheet with notepad then copy contents & paste it into the cuesheet tag of the FLAC image file within foobar

Tip: Keep the external CUE Sheet to display your image's tracks in Winamp using this plugin & for later restoring your image to a compliant audio CD

3. Open Burnatonce

Mastering\Data DVD(or CD)\ISO Settings

Tick only:

• Compliant PVD
• ISO9660:1999
• Joliet Names
• Long Joliet Names
• UDF v1.02
• Rock Ridge

This will allow maximum character & folder limits

Press OK, drag & drop your files, compile then press write.

Tip: Burn with UDF directory records, Par(2) recovery volumes &/or SFV/MD5 checksums to be sure you have the best error detection & recovery.

And that's all you need to do to create a lossless back-up.


Image Restoration

In this section of the guide we will restore our back-up to a compliant audio CD, this will be useful if your original CD becomes damaged or lost.

Copy your backed-up image & EAC generated CUE sheet to where EAC originally extracted them on your hard drive so that the paths in the CUE sheet are correct


a. Decoding

Open: FLAC Frontend then input your FLAC image file (.FLAC file) you just copied to your hard disk

Press: decode, this will restore your FLAC image back to WAV making it compatible with your EAC generated CUE sheet.


b. Burning

Open: EAC then go to Tools\Write CD-R (Alt-W), the EAC Writer window will open

Go to: File\Load CUE Sheet, open your working folder & select the EAC generated CUE then press Open

Go to: CD-R\write CD, then select Close CD & press Make It So to begin writing.

Tip: Write at low speeds for best results.

And that's all you need to do to restore your back-up.



Links

Lossless Audio comparisons

• Omion's FLAC comparisons
• FLAC multi-format comparisons
• Speek's multi-format comparisons
• HansHeijden's multi-format comparisons
• TTA multi-format comparisons

Other lossless guides

• Synthetic Soul's Monkey's Audio guide
• Eli's FLAC + EAC guide

Other tools

• .mp3size - calculates & compares space used by lossy, lossless & uncompressed
• FLACATTACK - Automates ripping to a image, encoding to FLAC & creating mp3's (file per track) for playback
• Burrrn - Automates image restoration, decoding & burning

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The reason I prefer UDF is for compatibility (as with FLAC) also it's support for long file names & becasue it's a newer standard it should have superior error correcting compared to ISO 9660.

I'm not going to try to sell using images instead of tracks just wanted to try to help those who prefer it for what ever reason. The reason I create an image rather than multiple files for back-ups (to DVD-R) is just that I find it a neater way of storing the data, tracks, pauses/hidden tracks, all the CD data is together, 1 CD = 1 file. I also use EAC to split the image at the CUE points & create APS mp3's for playback but I like to have a lossless image backed-up & stored in a safe place.


This post has been edited by CiTay: Aug 9 2006, 15:08

[Martin H]

If you have embedded the Cue Sheet into the 'CUESHEET' metadata block, then that will stay intact, but remember that there isn't any CD-TEXT stored in that block. If you have stored the Cue Sheet into the 'VORBIS_COMMENT' metadata block, as a 'CUESHEET' tag, and for example change a track title in fb2k, then the 'CUESHEET' tag will change accordingly in the FLAC image, but if you look at the 'CUESHEET' tag in fb2k's 'Properties' window, then it will look as if you haven't changed anything, and it will only show the change, if you select 'Reload Info From File'. So if you don't select 'Reload Info From File' before you copy/paste the contents of the 'CUESHEET' tag into a Cue Sheet file, then it will be the original Cue Sheet you will get...

-Martin.

This post has been edited by Martin H: Aug 7 2005, 01:14