How to rip a great MP3

Setup, use and understand ripping programs and formats for the best damn sound you've ever heard.

Let’s not beat around the bush – if you’re the type of person who can listen to 128Kb/s MP3s and not cringe, you may as well grab the first all-in-one MP3 ripper you can find, complete with Xing MP3 codec, and you deserve everything you get. If on the other hand you like to preserve the quality of your music, read on.

The first tool in any ripper’s toolkit is Exact Audio Copy. With so many error correction features, and even a ‘Paranoid’ mode, you can rarely go wrong.

Exact Audio Copy
Grab a copy and extract or install, depending on the version you’ve downloaded. During the setup, ensure you click ‘I prefer to have accurate results’. You’ll then be prompted to install and configure LAME through the program interface – don’t. We’ll want to do this manually later. Next, enter your email as something nonsensical, which will allow you to access freedb’s CD database so you can automatically assign album and track names to any CD you may enter. Finally, tell EAC you’re an expert and we’ll get into the options.

Click on the EAC menu and choose EAC Options. On the first tab (Extraction), change ‘Error Recovery Quality’ to ‘High’. Go to the general tab and check ‘On unknown CDs’ and set it to ‘Automatically access freedb database’.



On the Tools tab, you may wish to create a playlist automatically when ripping has finished, so selecting ‘Create .m3u playlist on extraction’ will fulfil that desire. You may also wish to automatically log the status report, for inclusion with your rips so you can refer back to their quality at any time.

It’s really not a good idea to run a compressor in the background (or really do anything while ripping), but those with dual core processors may be able to get away with it.

Normalise attempts to set all track volumes to the same level – leave this off for now. Set the naming scheme you’re most comfortable with through the Filename tab. Artist and track name are a minimum, but you may wish to include the CD title and track numbers as well if you’re ripping full albums. If you want a different naming scheme for compilation albums, select the ‘Use various artist naming scheme’ option – you may for example, wish to include the CD title (%C).

Various Artists
Most assume this option doesn’t have much flexibility, as it seems to miss the individual artist names whenever they throw in their compilation CDs – but they assume wrong! Just make sure your track title in EAC is in the format of Artist / Track Name, and everything should be hunky dory. If freeDB has imported the track names and artists happily, but has them the wrong way around, you can easily fix this by going to Database > Transform Actual CD Information and choosing ‘Exchange Artist <-> Title’. See? Not so useless after all.

Drive Options
Go to EAC > Drive Options, and make sure you’re in secure mode. This is considerably slower than the other modes, but will get you more accurate results, and is better if errors start cropping up on your disc.
If you get odd results when you rip, you may have to fiddle with a few settings on the ‘Drive’ tab to get things to suit your drive. You’ll notice an Offset tab – we’ll deal with this now, but in a more round about manner. Close the dialog and EAC. Note that you’ll have to configure every drive individually that you wish to use in EAC.

Good calibrations
Not all optical drives are built the same, as our good friend Zebra would attest to. They won’t all start and finish at the same place on an audio CD, meaning that sound could be lost at either end. It’s usually insignificant, but the purist likes to get these things right. The easiest way to find the offset is to simply download Accuraterip and dump the installed DLL file into your EAC directory. Put a music CD in the drive you wish to configure with Accuraterip and start EAC. Accuraterip will then check its database, and if you’re lucky, your drive will be in it and the values can be set automatically. Mind you, in reality for every single disc you rip that’s mastered by a different mastering unit, the offset will be different as the mastering units themselves will use a different offset, meaning that the value is really entirely relative. For the sake of easiness, one offset value is accepted for all rips – if you need to be more precise or your drive isn’t in the database, check out this page for obtaining a manual value. You may need to close EAC and rename the Accuraterip.dll file to regain access to the offset input boxes.



Offsets should only affect the first and last tracks, and although there is a write offset function, this shouldn’t be required if a properly offset read is performed.

Accuraterip also provides peace of mind, as after the ripping is finished, it then compares it to other rips people have made of the same track and gives you a ‘confidence rating’ – basically whether or not people got the same results. This is another way of ensuring a decent rip. Make sure to upload your results afterwards – the bigger the database, the better the community becomes.