I recently decided to make the transition to archiving my extensive CD collection into a lossless digital
format. After doing much research, I discovered EAC. I am writing to gain some validation on the choices that I've made with EAC. Considering that I'm relatively new to this excellent program, I figured I would run my choices by some of the audio experts and take advantage of all the experience gathered on these forums, so that I could feel more confident in my archival effort. I want to note that I'm not being lazy and have done my homework prior to this posting. I just don't want to get too far and find out I wasted effort by not doing things the "smartest" way possible.

I have used the "Detect Read Features..." option of EAC to configure my drive. EAC reported that my drive does support 'Accurate Stream' feature, does NOT cache audio data and is capable of retrieving C2 error information. Therefore, I have enabled the "Drive has 'Accurate Stream' feature" option, disabled the "Drive caches audio data" option and enabled the "Drive is capable of retrieving C2 error information" option. I did further validation on this by using the "Examine C2 feature" functionality of EAC. EAC was able to retrieve a C2 error from my drive, using a scratched CD.

I am ripping all of my CDs to FLAC format, using the best compression possible. Command line option: "-8 -V -T "artist=%a" -T "title=%t" -T "album=%g" -T "date=%y" -T "tracknumber=%n" -T "genre=%m" %s"

I then rip from CD by doing "Test and Copy Selected Tracks". I only accept the results of the copy on the
following conditions:

1. There are no errors found during the ripping process
2. Each track is reported as "Copy OK"
3. Each track has a matching "Test CRC" and "Copy CRC"

Am I archiving my collection in the best possible way? Am I wasting any effort here? Things I could do to get
better rips or better use of these rips in the future? When I listen to these FLAC files, will the sound quality be equal to or better than when I listen to the source CD?

I only want to be able to say that I'm not losing anything in the translation and that I am getting there efficiently.

Thanks to the originator of this great program and thanks to anyone who has the time to share their knowledge. These forums are filled with lots of valuable information that I've spent much time learning from. Up until last week, I knew nothing of EAC and planned on never switching from my trusty portable CD player and shelves of CDs.

I'd love to hear from others on their CD archival process. I know the few posts that I've found on this topic have been very interesting to read and very helpful.

-horrorbiz

Hello Horrorbiz!

With EAC I think you made a good choice for ripping.
The intent of lossless audio compressors is to be able
to reconstruct _exactly_ the same date as if it came
from CD. Hence playing them sounds no better or worse than the original.

I went to lossless compression end of last year, using EAC and OptimFrog. I was not as critical to read errors as you are, nevertheless I used DeGlitch to detect glitches in the files and correct them.

While the choice of compressor is more or less a matter of taste that has been discussed in length in this forum, the compression options I think is something you should reconsider. I recently went from OptimFrog to WavPack, since it provides a much faster compression/decompression (around 20x) for only little more disk space (about 10%). IMO this has three benefits:

- Faster ripping process (on my machine it took much longer to compress than to rip, even though I used both processors of my 3.04 GHz machine.)

- A batch lossy compression process is much quicker (took about a week to compress my 480 CDs with lame, again using both processors. Will be about 2 days (est.) now)

- Less processor load during playback (My CPU fan no longer spins up, saving me money and nerves)

Have fun going lossless!

A quick comment:
If you have difficulty getting matching CRCs you might want to uncheck the C2 option. With a large number of drives, errors can slip through without being detected when this setting is checked.

The AccurateRip plugin, which tests your results against a database of other users' results, provides a high degree of insurance that your rips are perfect. If you rip to individual tracks, with gaps appended by the default method (to previous), check it out.