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EAC - extracting an album
Table of content:
Trouble ? - EAC has problems to extract an album or a track ? - see Tips, Tricks & Troubleshooting
I. Preparation
1. Start the program EAC.
2. Insert an original, commercially-pressed CD in your well configured drive with loaded EAC-profile.
3. If the album is unknown, get the album information from freeDB / CDDB.
If you do not have internet connection for getting album information from internet, or the album is not known yet in those databases, you have to type in yourself the album information, i.e. CD Title, CD Artist, Year of release, Genre, Title names.
This is done very conveniently and quick, because EAC has a nice interface.
It might be useful to add '-flac' to end of album name in CD Title field, but only, if you encode to flac, of course (or another short cut of the Lossless encoder of your choice, like -wv for wavepack eg.). If you encode to mpc, leave it simply away, or add eg. the main quality setting like -q8.
4. After you have typed in carefully the album & title informations, close down EAC. So EAC has saved the album information in an internal database. In case of a crash, e.g. during extraction, you don't need to type in the information again. It is also a good thing, to send the album information to freeDB via internet, if you could not find that album there before and you had to type in manually yourself as described in 3.
If you should have got the album information from internet, then check carefully these names, because there are often mistakes, but you want perfection !
The information, which you have checked, edited or typed in manually, will be saved later on automatically by EAC in the tags and as album/title names for your album. So you have those names later on forever in your archive.
5. Start EAC again.
The CD will show up again with all the information.
II. Creating cue sheet (optional)
6. Click EAC - Action -> Detect Gaps (F4). Wait a short time during EAC is analyzing & detecting pre-track gaps.
7. Click EAC - Action -> Create CUE Sheet -> Multiple WAV Files With Gaps... (Noncompliant)
Wait a short time, until EAC offers you to save the cue sheet as album-name.cue as example.
(You could leave away steps 6. & 7. But it is easy & quick to do 6. & 7., to get this cue sheet. Maybe you need it in future, if you want to burn an exact image in future of your archived CD.)
III. EAC - Extract & Compress
8. Mark all tracks, songs of the album, which should be extracted. Do this either by EAC - Edit -> Select All (Ctrl+A), or especially if there is a data track on the CD, you should click on the last track (not the data track) until it is blue coloured, then press Shift & Arrow up , until all song tracks are marked.
9. Via Mouse right-click : Copy & Test Selected Tracks -> Compressed… (Shift+F6)
Press onto Compressed… (Shift+F6)
A window opens 'Save Waveform'. Select the directory, where you want to save the album. At the bottom of the window, you see 'Filetype: External Compressor (*.your-selected-format)', e.g. either *.mpc or *.wv, *.flac, *.ape etc.
Press simply Save.
EAC starts immediately with the extraction and parallel compression of the audio data. EAC will show you the progress & the time it will approximately need until finished.
It is a good idea to scan the cover of the extracted album or the complete booklet. You have some time during EAC's extraction. Here is a short How To scan booklets.
IV. End of extraction & Creating EAC log file:
If the extraction of EAC is finished, following window will pop up:
Press OK.
Then following window pops up:
Press Create Log, and save the EAC log file with a name like 'log (tracknumber) album name' (.log). Then you have saved it. EAC creates automatically a log, but that is titled 'album name.log' in each case of extraction. If you need to extract again a single track, maybe because a checksum (crc) was not matching by 1st extraction or a read error happened, this automatically created log will be overwritten by EAC and it would be lost.
When have you had a successful album extraction, which can be considered to be 'Perfect High Quality' ?
E.g. the status & error messages window of EAC above shows 'No errors occurred' and all crc checksums of the Test run and the Read / Copy run are matching, i.e. they are the same for each extracted track, like shown here:
In 10th column 'CRC' is shown for each track 'OK' as positive result (and in 8th (Read CRC) & 9th column (Test CRC) you see always the same crc value for each song).
If in 10th column you see '#' (instead of OK) shown for a track, you should try to extract this special track again. Maybe it helps to reduce the read-speed of your drive with a tool, or you try another better drive, if you have more than 1 drive available, see Troubleshooting, Tips & Tricks.
So, if you are satisfied with your extraction (you have a reason to be satisfied if each track has same Test & Read (Copy) crc checksum), then:
Proceed with Finalizing !
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