How to rip a great MP3

Before you rip
Clean the CD! Sounds crazy, but it will help to prevent possible read errors. Some of that spray stuff with a soft cloth that you can buy from Big W or other associated stores does wonders. Some even recommend compressed air to blow off the smaller particles.

You can now finally rip your CD to WAV if you like after all that setup – just don’t do anything that taxes the CPU at the same time! Simply select the tracks you wish to rip and hit the big WAV button. This is good for checking to see if your drive is accurately ripping, but of course in the long run you’ll want to compress to another format, and since we can automate that process through EAC, don’t waste your time ripping the whole album just yet!

Sounds of silence
Sometimes when you rip from CD you’ll get nothing but big fat silent MP3s – still the right length, but there’s absolutely nothing as far as sound is concerned. This is EAC’s way of saying it can’t communicate with your drive properly. There are two ways to fix this, and both of them involve installing an ASPI layer. You can either grab ForceASPI (ignore the recommendation to get the newer ASPI, it has brought nothing but troubles since its release long ago), or grab Ahead’s ASPI DLL from its site and dump it in the EAC directory. Ahead doesn’t like you doing this for ‘other software burning programs’, but that’s okay, because we won’t be using EAC’s burning function anyway, right? Grab it from here.

Go to EAC Options, click the Interface tab and ‘Installed external ASPI interface’ should no longer be greyed out. Select it, click OK and restart EAC. Your problems should be gone.

Conversion, software, version 7.0
Which format you should compress to causes more debate than whether or not Paris Hilton can sing. Some argue that it’s about pitch and perfect audio reproduction, others say it doesn’t matter so long as you get the general idea, and they don’t quite mind the visualisations either.

Pure audiophiles use completely lossless formats. We’re not going to get into a format war, but we are going to give you a run down of how to convert to some of these formats. Just make sure you’re converting from the cleanest possible source – if you’ve used lossy compression like MP3, and convert from that to another lossy compression like OGG, it’s just going to get worse, much like saving a JPEG over and over again. Start with the WAV file you initially ripped from EAC. If you want to be the most pedantic listener on the planet, head over to Übernet and read to your heart’s content. You may also want to head to Hydrogen Audio and join the ranks of opinionated audiophiles hiding there. Opinionated audiophile? We love a good tautology at Atomic.

MP3
MP3 is a worldwide accepted audio format, and you can’t go past LAME for MP3 encoding. Quality and options vary between versions, and evidence on the Net suggests that 3.90.3 was the last ‘golden’ child and is widely used. You can get the executable from the Über Guide. Drop it into your EAC directory.
Now while we’re big fans of brute forced constant bitrate 224Kb/s MP3s, it is wasteful on space – so we’ll use the Ubernet standard for encoding our MP3s – not to mention this standard pulls off a few tricks for brilliant sounding audio. If you want to follow the standard to the letter, then you have a bit of reading to do on naming conventions, and you’ll probably want to download Ubernet’s supplied config files as well for auto-configuring EAC, not to mention Ubernet’s quality checking tool.



Otherwise, open up EAC and go to EAC > Compression options and go to the External Compression tab. Check ‘Use external program for compression’ and select ‘LAME MP3 Encoder’ from the drop down list. Hit the browse button and find your LAME.exe file that you previously dumped into your EAC directory. Now, just click the Open button.

In the ‘Additional command line options’ input field, enter --alt-preset standard, which should create a VBR MP3 averaging around 200Kb/s. Audio quality is of course subjective based on the listener’s hearing capability, so you can use --alt-preset extreme to average around 260Kb/s if you’re still sure you can hear differences. For any higher bitrate, it’s recommended to use a lossless format like FLAC rather than going the full 320Kb/s MP3 hog. The bitrate drop down box will be ignored in the face of this command line. Click OK, select the tracks you wish to extract, then hit the MP3 button to start the extraction. You may wish to only do one track first to check quality.