hey all,

i'm just starting to know how to use eac, and i'm already wondering about foobar...

how good is it vs eac ?

EAC is an audio cd ripper
Foobar is an audio player

These are two totally different programs.


EDIT: The ripping functions of EAC are much better than the primitive ripping function in Foobar2000 (no error correction).

sorry about that

Both are arguably the best at what they do, so at least you're not totally off track! Just take some time to read around and it won't take you long before you've got a handle on things.

foobar can also rip cds. not as well as eac of course.

If you don't need secure extraction, foobar actually makes quite a good ripper with some unique and useful features. You get:

• on the fly encoding (if supported by encoder)
• freedb support with a database to locally store information
• perfect tagging
• optional "hard-coded" replaygain independent of target format
• very flexible file naming and directory creation
• ability to use any encoder with a command line interface
• DSP

I use EAC in secure mode for copying CDs, but for encoding stuff for my portable I keep a specially configured installation of foobar 0.7.7b on my HD. Tags come from CDPLAYER.INI (using foo_cdda_freedb) or freedb. I run replaygain on the CD I want to rip, then encode to MP3 with a preamp setting of +3dB. I also use DSP with Skip Silence, Advanced Limiter and 4Front Headphones enabled. What I get are perfect files with equal loudness, slight dynamics compression where necessary, silent passages >2 sec removed automatically, and a little reverb + crossfeed that make the music more listenable through headphones. My portable is a cheap piece of junk (yet good enough for working out) that plays files in alphabetical order, but uses DOS 8.3 filenames to do the sorting. With foobar, I can have filenames that begin with a more or less unique 6 character sequence (abbreviations of artist and album + tracknumber), so the sorting works regardless of my player's strange behaviour.
I don't know of any other ripper that can do all this.