|
Exact Audio Copy is an audio grabber for audio CDs using standard CD and DVD-ROM drives.
It works with a technology, which reads audio CDs almost perfectly. If there are any errors that can’t be corrected, it will tell you on which time position the (possible) distortion occurred, so you could easily control it with e.g. the media player With other audio grabbers you usually need to listen to every grabbed wave because they only do jitter correction. Scratched CDs read on CD-ROM drives often produce distortions. But listening to every extracted audio track is a waste of time. Exact Audio Copy conquer these problems by making use of several technologies like multi-reading with verify and AccurateRip. Features: - All kinds of CD and DVD drives are supported (including USB, Firewire, SATA and SCSI drives) - Hidden sector synchronization (jitter correction) - A secure, a fast and a burst extraction methods selectable. Fast extraction should run at the same speed as other grabbers with jitter correction, but is probably not exact anymore. Burst mode just grabs the audio data without any synchronization. - Detection of read errors and complete losses of sync and correction in the secure mode, as far as possible - Output of time positions of all non-exact corrections and the possibility to listen to these positions - EAC is able to copy ranges of music data, not only tracks - Automatic speed reduction on read errors and fallback to a higher speed afterwards (depends on the used drive) - Volume normalization of extracted audio to a given percentage - Usage of the Windows Audio Compression manager (ACM Codecs) for direct compression to e.g. MP3 waves - Support for the LAME DLL that is usable like an ACM Codec for on-the-fly MP3 compression - Support of external MP3, WMA, flac and OggVorbis encoders for automatic compression after extraction (supports multi-processor environments) - Batch compression to WAV files and decompression of supported encoded files to WAV - Compression offset support for exact compression/decompression - Detection of pre-track gaps (positions where negative track times runs towards 00:00:00) - Detection of silence in pre-track gaps - Automatic creation of CUE sheets for Burnnn, Feurio, Nero or even EAC, which can include all gaps, indicies, track attributes, UPC and ISRC and also CD-Text for an exact copy - CD player functionality and prelistening to selected ranges - Automatic detection of drive features, whether a drive has an accurate stream and/or does caching - Sample offsets for drives with noaccurate streams, including the option of filling up missing samples with silence - Synchronizing between tracks for non-accurate stream drives - Trackname editing with local/remote CD databases support and more features like ID3 tagging - Browse and edit local database - Certified Escient ® CDDB(TM)Compatible - Local CDDB support - Record and loop record functions for recording from LP, radio, etc. - Automatic renaming of MP3 files accordingto their ID3 tag - Catalog extraction function (e.g. first 20 seconds of a track) - Multisession (CD-Extra) support - CD-Text support - CD-Write support for some drives (internally and using CDRDAO) - ID3 V1.1 tag editor with drag and drop ability from track listing and CD database browser - Glitch removal after extraction - Small WAV editor with the following functionality: delete, trim, normalize, pad, glitch removal, pop detection, interpolation of ranges, noise reduction, fade in/out, undo (and much more) |
|
In secure mode this program either reads every audio sector at least twice or rely on extended error information that some drives are able to return with the audio data. That is one reason why the program is slower than other rippers. But by using this technique non-identical sectors are detected. If an error occurs (read or sync error), the program keeps on reading this sector, until eight of 16 retries are identical, but at maximum one, three or five times (according to the selected error recovery quality) these 16 retries are read. So, in the worst case, bad sectors are read up to 82 times! But this effort will help the program to obtain the best result by comparing all of the retries.
If it is not sure that the audio stream is correct (at least that it can not be said at approx. 99.5%) the program will tell the user where the (possible) read error occurred. The program also tries to correct the jitter artefacts that occur on the first block of a track, so that each extraction should be exactly the same. On drives which have the “accurate stream” feature, this is guaranteed. Of course, this technology is a little bit more complex, especially with some CD drives which implements caching. When drives cache audio data, every sector read will be read from the drives cache and is that way always identical. Basically there are several ways to clear the cache. In newer versions it will overread sectors, so that the cache contains sectors from a position elsewhere on the CD.
EAC has several secure read modes, depending on the features of the drive. One really fast mode (nearly burst mode speed) is for drives with C2 error pointer support, accurate stream and are non-caching. Another mode (up to half of maximum speed) is for non-caching, accurate stream drives (without C2 support). If caching need to be defeated, the secure mode will be much slower, when no read errors occur it will usually something around a third to a fourth of the drives maximum speed.
This program is really quite slow in secure mode in comparison with other grabbers, but the program checks every sector over and over to get the correct data with high certainty. If you don’t like this feature of EAC and prefer fast copies instead of secure copies, you are able to use the fast or burst extraction option in the drive options menu. But of course in fast mode, the program will no longer be able to find read errors. Only if a read error occurs in a sector synchronization area, a sync error will be displayed. Fast mode is sector synchronized with 2 synchronization blocks of 23 total blocks. Burst copy is even worse, no synchronization is performed at all, enabling extraction at maximum speed of the drive. No error checking of any kind is done. For burst mode there is at least a small indicator of the extracted track quality. If the stream ever breaks, it will tell the user in the status report by showing up suspicous positions. Of course this is only an heuristic; there needn’t be any errors on these positions; moreover there could be errors that are not found at all.
Click here to read tutorial about how to use Exact Audio Copy and other rippers...
|