How to Rip CDs to .FLAC using Exact Audio Copy (Lossless)

all right everybody so in this video I'm going to be showing you how to rip your music to FLAC files which is a lossless compression format using a program called exact audio copy now I'm assuming you already know your reasons for wanting to do this if you're coming to this video so I won't get into it as it will start a huge discussion but basically if you want super high quality audio if you have some really good pair of headphones in a deck or amplifier and you want to listen to all the frequencies possible you're going to want your music in a pretty good format obviously three hundred twenty kilobit mp3s are somewhat acceptable and I mean if you're going with mp3's because you need it to work with an iPod or something that's certainly your best option or what apple lossless codec of course or you could use exact audio copy and get you some flat files which will work in a variety of media players just not iTunes and you can play on your computer with some high quality cans or a hi-fi system now to get exact audio copy go to exact audio copy de and download and install it and make sure you have a CD in your system a couple of notes about ripping CDs which I feel like in 2015 I shouldn't have to cover but just in case I do a if you have a copied CD or a custom burnt CD it's probably not a good idea to want to rip it to flak because if it's burnt from mp3s you're just going to have horrible sounding audio in the first place and if it's copied there could still be some compression issues so you want to make sure you have original CDs and if they're too too scratched up it may not work but it's the worth a shot now before you do anything we're going to want to change some options so go up here - EA C options or it may pop up the wizard on you first and you're going to be greeted with this you want to leave I ask every time setup that way you can set up your audio in different folders head up to the extraction tab and just kind of make sure it looks like this the big difference are going to be looking for is the error recovery quality you want it to be high especially if you're using older CDs that have some scratches on it as you want it to have the highest quality error recovery as possible on the general tab just make sure it generally looks like this I don't have full explanation for it you certainly don't want it to turn off your computer or anything like that tell it to wait for external compressors most of this should be about the same you definitely want it to automatically access online media database that way you can get your artists and song titles and stuff because if you're ripping like more than two CDs putting in your own metadata is going to be a royal pain in the butt hopping over to the tools tab same thing make sure it kind of looks like this there are some things you might want to change but personally this is what I prefer it hides the compressor window so you don't have more windows pop enough that you could screw up it creates a playlist so that way you have playlists for winamp and things like that don't to normalize you can set up your file name structure to be like artist artist - album title - track number - track title that's how I keep it you have all these options you can choose from to create your own naming scheme that's what I like about it and then hit OK next we're going to go up to drive options it's going to pop up this window I keep unchecking it hit OK and then you're going to want it to be in secure mode and you're going to hit detect read features I'm not going to do it now because I already have it set up but it's going to tell you what features your drive has available and automatically check them so just leave it as that because if you tell it it has something that it does not have it's going to screw things up at the Drive tag tat tag tab and basically leave everything unchecked but ideally you're going to be using mmm c1 you can auto detect the command and it'll tell you something different but ideally you're going to be MMC one through three so choose one but then auto detect it and let it tell you which one it is and see what it tells you off set speed leave alone although make sure it's kind of like that gap detection leave alone detection I'll actually don't leave this alone detection method a or B I believe sometimes you can use C but I hear C is like a last resort and V are the best detection you want it to be secure that way it secure in this form in this context of the application basically just means as accurate as possible and then you don't need to worry about the writer because we're not going to be writing for this tutorial hit OK and then go up to compression options we're going to be messing with a lot of options real quick here I'm just trying to blow through them waveform you don't do anything with external complete compression click that user-defined encoder and we're going to be using dot black and it should have exact audio copy should have installed a copy of the black encoder with it as you see here it's in the exact audio copy program files that's what you need we're going to be using FLAC files now change the bitrate all the way down to the bottom one megabit per second that's what we want that's the highest possible quality make sure high quality is checked there's no reason tool there's no reason to rip to a lossless format if you're going to use the lower than the highest quality that defeats the purpose make sure delete WAV file after compression is checked that way it deletes it because first it rips it to a completely uncompressed WAV and then it compresses it to whatever you want you don't want two copies that's going to take up a hell of a lot of space and then make sure all those are checked comments read comment text the id3 tag you're probably not gonna be using comments but just in case and then you're gonna want all this pretty much set up this just sets up metadata tags that most media programs will recognize it okay obviously pause the video at whatever point can go back if you need to get the option set up alright metadata provider by default it uses like cue tools or something as you set that up I prefer our cue tools actually only gives you ten pre ones before you have to pay for it so I use the free DB metadata plug-in and then put in your email get an active server list and it will use that to automatically detect your metadata now I'm going to eject my CD and put it back in so you can see what happens when it is detected and back in and if it for sure finds a single option of what your CD is it will automatically like this fill in your information which is great that's what you want it to do now every once in a while something is going to be missing like for here that's the year Street Fighter 3 original soundtrack I actually have I'm ripping the Street Fighter 25th Anniversary Collection CDs and so they are they'll show up as different things because they're different soundtracks and so this is what it's going to look like otherwise it's going to pop up a little box that asks you to choose from a couple of different options just pick the one that seems to be the most accurate for your CD double check to make sure the songs are right like here and you're good to go and then over here where it says CD cover you're going to want to right click in this empty space and hit get new image for metadata provider and then it's going to provide you an option to search for album covers I'm going to you usually want to delete any extraneous text because it's going to have trouble finding it and then I always start with the large images so you can get as high quality of an album as possible obviously here it's not going to do that because this is kind of a niche thing that may not even have an album cover in the first place because you see here it's pulling up game covers in most cases it's going to have an album cover if you're doing actual music I'm doing weird things weird soundtracks and stuff so it's not going to have it so for this egg this video I'm just going to choose a game cover here and then you are good to go to start the ripping process overall but before we can rip rip we have to do one thing well actually two things so select all your tracks you can either just drag up and select them all or hit ctrl a go up here to action and hit detect gaps what this is going to do is it's going to detect the gaps between all of your tracks sometimes CDs leave gaps between tracks before they start and you for the ripping process you want to make sure that it knows where those gaps are otherwise the ripping process may screw up a little bit it's more of a safety precaution but again when you're ripping to lossless format you want it to be as straight you know as seamless as possible so that's what we are doing here and it's just going to go through and read your CD and to take the gaps between the tracks and then let's say you wanted to double check that a track was what it said so you don't remember it you can select it and then hit the play button up here that seems to be correct now the down here is the progress of the song that's playing unfortunately you can't really skip forward because it's reading it live from the CD so if you try to skip forward it's going to get all jumpy and act weird and then over here by the way you can also select the you can change track numbers and so for example this is actually CD 4 or want to say you know it CD three out of eleven out of this set now technically for this album it's one of two but for the whole set which is when I'm tracking it's three out of eleven so that's what I'm going to select here and then that's going to add that to the metadata as well and then say you have a two-part soundtrack that just goes from disc one to this two and say disc one starts with track one but this two starts with track 26 or something you can tell it what the first track number is so it doesn't restart it at track one and confuse the information with this one it does start over at one each disk so that's what I'm going to tell it to do now once your gaps are detected this column right here where it says gap is going to fill in a lot of them will just be two or like two seconds or point two seconds or zero but a lot of music CDs that I've ripped have had quite a few gaps next you want to go up here to action and go to create cue sheet and we're going to do multiple WAV files with gaps because we have the gaps and we're going to be doing multiple files and that's the easiest way to go we're not leaving out the gaps we're not correcting for gaps we're just leaving them there and we're having multiple files and the cue sheet is basically just like it's hard to describe it's kind of like a playlist list and just tracking to make sure everything is as its supposed to and so tell it where to go you can make a folder structure you can do typically you want to do it like this where it's artist album year black but that's my personal preference for this specific set I'm putting them all in one folder hits the Street Fighter 25th anniversary set of soundtracks and other sound effects and then you name your cue file which typically should be the album name but you can technically change it to whatever you want and then I'm going to change this to be 25th anniversary set disc 3 and hit save finally go up here to action test and copy selected tracks compressed you want to test it that way it can error correct it and then copy in it is just compressing it to FLAC files and then that's what compressed means is we're doing the flat files instead of the wav files if you wanted to rip down compress wave you can do uncompressed we are doing correct comb tip we're doing compressed for the sake of this video and it pops up where you wanted to save it should be in the same place as your Q folder always or Q file always but it should automatically take you to that folder you just made it okay and it's going to go through and test and rip your tracks now this box right here where it says error correction will light up if it's spinning a lot of time error correcting and often I've had it on really damaged CDs where it will have a sync error or it will be unable to either rip the file to a wav file or it will be unable to compress it if it's unable to compress it because of the error correcting you still are actually given a WAV file in that folder that doesn't get deleted you can either delete it or keep it in my experience the WAV files still ends up being intact and useful but if you're going for a pure flack encoding then you may not want to do that however if it doesn't if it's not able to rip it at all then basically you just need to either not worry about that song or find another copy of the CD as well this whole process will vary depending on how many tracks are on your saw on your how many songs are on your CD typically it will take about an hour to an hour and a half total to test and copy all the songs and then your CD is done obviously this is a lot slower than normal CD ripping however that's because it's double checking for errors for compression issues things like that and then ripping it and then compressing it to flak and to me the end result is well worth it I do hope you enjoyed this video I hope it was helpful towards learning to extract your audio with exact audio copy into black format if you have any questions I do suggest posting in the support area for EAC and/or general audio forums and getting help there or talking to each other in the comments leave a like if you liked the video leave a dislike if you disliked it subscribe for more tech videos check out our other content and our support links in the description below and I will see you on a future video thank you for watching my name's been Adam or a pose box

Channel: EposVox

Views: 236,200

Keywords: how to rip to flac, how to use exact audio copy, exact audio copy flac, cd to flac, exact audio copy, exact audio copy tutorial, exact audio copy flac tutorial, cd ripping tutorial, eac flac, eac tutorial, how to use flac files, flac tutorial, lossless flac, flac audio, CD Ripper (Software Genre), convert, tutorial, howto, ripping, lossless music, windows, rip, mp3, cd, eac, flac, lossless, FLAC (Software), lossless music tutorial, quality, how to

Id: 58RmQsGGbeQ

Length: 13min 10sec (790 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 11 2015