I know everyone loves EAC as the most accurate ripper. So am I correct in assuming that if I use WMA lossless that I'm actually losing some information because the ripper won't be completely accurate?

I mean if EAC is completely accurate but others aren't then the lossless encoding might be perfect, but if it doesn't have proper data to work with, effectively it's not completely lossless.

Does anyone think this difference would ever be audible?

Could be in scratched cds

If the CD is in perfect condition you might be ok. EAC would only really be needed if there were read problems with the CD, such as damaged/scratched CD etc. I wouldn't use WMP for ripping CDs though because of some bad experiences with it in the past (when I was new to digital audio and used, amongst other things, products such as AudioCatalyst with Xing encoder...)

Unless you're going to listen to every rip, you won't know. Spend a little time understanding the CD Audio spec - it's 20+ years old, and wasn't designed to have especially good error detection or correction.

Investing the many space on HD, DVD or CD, for your lossless backupped albums,
then it is worth to use the best program available, EAC.
Have a look at the *
, and use a lossless external encoder in EAC, like FLAC.exe, have a look here in the forum for the intermediate *-guides for WavePack-Hybrid or FLAC.

eac & flac guide:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=14880


eac & wavepack hybrid guide:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/show.php/showtopic/14879


MOD: * no links or names to ripping group guides please.

But this is where EAC is so nice.

I have some CD's that are ugly on the bottom that EAC quite easily ripped, and some that are very nice looking that had tracks that refused to rip w/o suspicious regions.

The nice thing about EAC is that you can listen to suspicious regions and determine wether you are happy with it, or if you need to try again. There's nothing I hate more than ripping a CD and then later finding out there are artifacts - EAC has never failed me, and if a track doesn't rip cleanly, I can deal with it (sometimes just requires a few wipes with a CD cleaning cloth) at rip time and know that my rips are either good, or the CD is damaged.

I assume that WMP has a way to encode to lossless wma from a wav file on hard disk (I stay away from that format myself) - so you should be able to use EAC and then encode the raw wav files - and know the condition of your rips.

There's not much point in doing anything further with a ripped file if it is damaged - better to know at rip.

To extract audio tracks, I use CDDAE99. Nice tool, simple GUI. It do a two-pass reading, control drive speed, error correction, error interpolation, multiple tracks processing.

Look at link 1 or link 2 or search

Happy extracting!