I most generally make mix CDs of my favorite music, but occassionally need to back up something in my collection. I used to use Easy CD Creator, but have since sworn off bloatware. Can anyone recommend a simple and reliable disc-at-once backup solution for audio CDs?

Thanks!

In most situations EAC does the job for me. However I had a burnt cd that was corrupt for some reason. It wasn't scratched but EAC would give sync errors. No other program would copy it without errors.

I recently started using Blindwrite for game backups etc and decided to try it in conjunction with my Samsung dvd burner to copy the cd. Seems to have worked great.

So can anyone else vouch for Blindwrite's usefullness in backing up audio cd's?

The general practise to back up CDs is to rip using EAC (or maybe CDEx or Audiograbber), and encode to lossless codec, like FLAC or WavPack, or sometimes just high quality MP3.

This provides the benefit of taking up less MiB, allowing you to store many CDs on a hard drive or even DVD. Usng EAC to read the disc also provides a more secure read.

If you really wanted to you could rip and burn to audio CD with EAC.

Note that there are two kinds of "lossless" when backing up Audio CDs. First there's secure and error-proof copying of the audio data, which quite some rippers should do flawlessly, and then there's the lossless preservation of the original CD's track layout, AFAIK only EAC is able to back this up correctly in a CUE sheet for most CDs, but there are exceptions (Hidden Track One Audio).

Also note that a true 1:1 copy of an Audio CD will never be possible, because of how the CDDAs and the optical PC drives were devised. But the differences are so minimal that it's nothing to care about.

dbpoweramp for me, and then EAC.

EAC will require me to first rip the CD audio to to hard drive, manually arrange the WAVs in the correct order, then write them. It's not as easy as a source disc in one drive and a blank disc in another; push a button and wait a couple minutes. Am I correct on this?

Manual arrangement of waves is not necessary if you either: a) configure EAC to include track numbers in the filenames or b) create a CUE sheet.

If you ask me, one-button copy solutions are overrated and you'll be hard-pressed to find one that does a more precise job than EAC.