Hello everyone, I found these forums very helpful for backing up my CD collection.
I use EAC to rip and foobar for listening. I've been using LAME V0 for all my previous rips. I'm considering FLAC for my next rips and I'm curious to know if it makes any difference to encode in EAC or foobar. Are there any pros and cons that may affect the sound quality?

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Yes, I'm aware of pointing the programs to the external compressor. Is there a specific reason why you recommend encoding to FLAC in EAC and not in FB2k?

If you are re-ripping your CD's, then EAC can be a more secure rip than fb2k, though both rip secure. If you already have the WAV files on your HD, then use fb2k. The encoding part makes no difference which program is used, as both call the external FLAC.exe. It's the ripping part that requires the decision to use either EAC or fb2k. I hope that helps.

If you rip with EAC you'll find it's a lot less work to configure EAC to create and tag the flac files than have foobar convert and tag wave files. The key part here is saving yourself additional work in tagging as an extra step.

Now if you rip to a single file wave image and create a cue sheet using EAC, creation of individual tagged flac files with foobar is simplified and no longer an extra step, though I'm not recommending this method. If you want a single file per album then by all means go for it but maybe consider that EAC can also convert a single file wave image to a single file flac image as part of the initial ripping process.

I'm using EAC to rip and have no intention of changing that. I like to have a separate file for each track and I don't plan on changing that either. I'm not worried about the tagging since I use mp3tag to adjust the tags after creating the flac files.
I was just wondering if it made a difference if I let EAC or fb2k do the encoding. I like to rip the tracks as waves first and then encode them using fb2k since the interface looks much more user friendly.

There is no difference.

Not taking tagging into account, this still sounds like extra work to me and hence not as user-friendly.

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EAC_and_FLAC
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...Lossless_Backup

If you want less work then use EAC to rip and encode to FLAC and tag them.

You can then still mess around with the tags after but if you set the information in EAC correctly you should even need to do that much.

Personally I use fb2k for ripping, encoding to flac and replaygaining (in one step so to say)... and since EAC as well as fb2k rip secure, there should be no difference whatsoever.

Pls. do correct me if I am wrong here... thank you!

fb2k has no AccurateRip support. Besides this there are differences between the two designs that can result in differences in output.

You can create a script to incorporate Replaygain (even in album mode) into EAC's ripping process as well.

EDIT: Link added to a very nice example.

hmmm... differences in output... I thought "secure" means bit-by-bit identical outputs when it comes to ripping. If I understand correctly, those differences can't be caused by the flac.exe, since EAC as well as fb2k use the same flac.exe. Besides that, I believe those differences don't necessarily mean differences in audio-quality...?

About the script for incorporating replaygain into EAC's ripping-process... that (and the EAC-set-up) is exactly why I use fb2k. Foobar is easy to use and I don't have to fiddle around with stuff I have no clue about (scripts). But I do understand that EAC might be first choice for experienced users who know what they are doing. Accurate Rip makes sense if you rip stuff that other people rip often too. I found for a very specialized music-taste, Accurate Rip often has no comparisons.

With all respect, the guy already said he isn't interested in using foobar to rip.

Foobar vs. EAC has already been discussed to death. We don't need a repeat in this thread.

I understand. Thanks for the link to the EAC vs. fb2k-discussion.

Thanks for the link to the script, I had no idea you could do that

It's not very important, but FLAC files created in foobar will lack seekpoints. Unless you want them for some reason, it shouldn't be a problem. This difference has nothing to do with sound quality, so it doesn't sound as if it would be of concern to you.