EAC is a great and easy-to-use audio grabber for CD-ROM drives. The main differences towards most other audio grabbers : Low registration costs (just a postcard and a stamp), it works with a new technology, reading 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.

Tips

Profiles from previous versions can not be used by this version of EAC. If you would like to import these, you need a side by side installation of the new EAC version and the older one. Load the settings in the older one and exit the program. Then start the new EAC and save that profile.

When installing EAC in a different directory than your old EAC, all your CD information will be gone. To add the old information use the "Database / Import Database..." command and select the file in your old EAC directory.

It is possible that under Vista the WMA compression will not work, this is due to restrictions in the scripting host. There are several workarounds, e.g. starting EAC with admin rights.

NOTE: Some antivirus application might identify the adware components present in this software as a virus. The application itself is not infected so if you uncheck the adware component your computer will be infected by malware.

Here are some key features of "Exact Audio Copy":

· Usage of the Windows 95 and Windows NT ASPI Interface, so both SCSI and ATAPI CD-ROM drives are supported
· Hidden sector synchronization (jitter correction)
· Secure, fast and burst extraction methods selectable. Fast extraction should run at the same speed as other grabbers, but is probably not exact anymore. Burst mode just grabs the audio data without any synchronization.
· Read error and complete loss of sync detection and correction in secure modes, as far as possible
· Output of time positions of all non-exact corrections and listen to these positions
· Copy of ranges of music data, not only tracks
· Automatic Speed reduction on errors and fallback afterwards
· Normalization of extracted audio
· Usage of the Windows Audio Compression Manager (ACM Codecs) for direct compression e.g. to MP3 waves
· Support for the BladeEnc DLL that is usable like an ACM Codec for online MP3 compression
· Support of external MP3, VQF, RA and AAC encoders for automatic compression after extraction
· Batch compression and decompression of/to WAV files
· Compression offset support for exact compression/decompression
· Detection of pre-track gaps
· Detection of silence in pre-track gaps
· Automatic creation of CUE sheets for CDRWin, including all gaps, indicies, track attributes, UPC and ISRC
· 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 no accurate streams, including the option of filling up missing samples with silence
· Option for synchronizing tracks for non-accurate stream drives
· Filename editing with local and remote CDDB database and cdplayer.ini support and more features like ID3 tagging
· Browse and edit local database
· Certified Escient CDDB Compatible
· Local CDDB support
· Record and Loop Record functions for recording from LP, radio, etc.
· Automatic rename of MP3 files according to their ID3 tag
· Catalog extraction function
· Multisession (CD-Extra) support
· CD-Text support
· CD-Write support for some drives
· ID3 Tag editor with drag and drop possibility from track listing and database
· 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 more)
· Program is Cardware, so feel free to copy

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Fixed a small bug in some of the CRC calculations
· Paths of 1000 characters in length (and file names up to 500 characters) can now be used (hopefully all command line compressors are still working)
· Fixed the creation of the correct CUE sheet in some cases when using current gap settings
· Fixed CDRDAO writing for multisession discs (leaving the CD open)
· EAC should not bring up its main window on using external compressors
· Fixed a small bug when correcting an extracted block
· Wizard now creates --ignore-tag-errors option for LAME encodings
· Fixed that on inserting a different CD sometimes not all tracks are extracted

Reasons why this program is marked as ad-supported:

· Creates desktop shortcuts for items unrelated to the program's functionality