eac vs itunes ripping

At least EAC and Max are free, so no "Audiophool" is paying for them. Except their times I guess.

EAC's mythic status can easily be explained. Some years ago, it really was just about the only way to make sure you were getting a bit-perfect copy. So naturally it was widely touted at the time as "the best."

But EAC wasn't doing anything impossible or, for that matter, proprietary. And pretty soon, bit-perfect copies became run-of-the-mill. But thanks to the Wayback Machine, there are still all those old posts on the Web declaring EAC to be "the best," and impressionable consumers believe them.

EAC has acquired a sort of mystic status which is not based on reality.

Sure, if you have a particularly bad CD, or your optical drive does not have C2 error correction then it has its place.

I use a Plextor PX-708UF drive and rip to WMA lossless using Windows Media Player which is a heck of lot more convenient that fiddling around with EAC's cumbersome functions.

When I binary compare with files ripped by EAC there is precisely no difference in the audio bits. Some of the header and footer information shows up as being differnt but that is all. I have tried this with old CDs that need error correction and the result is the same.

I'm sure iTunes can do just fine too. Don't believe the hype - check it out for yourself.

For Bob and all Mac users:

For the equivelent of EAC on Macintosh check out Max. It has a "full paranoia" setting plus it lets you select how many times you want the software to reread the problem bytes before it skips (plus a never skip checkbox) and will keep a log (if you so desire).

I have been using it for about four months and believe it is the best Ripping software available (at least for Macs). I have watched CDs being ripped and it zips through most but if you have it set for "Full Paranoia" and "never skip" as I do, it will slow down (sometimes to a crawl) when it finds a bad soundByte. ;)

Max is also a converter. It can translate between some 20+ formats.

Best of all: it's free!

Holderlin, EAC is a windows only program. The only way we Mac users can use EAC is use VirtualPC software. I have found that I can rip files in Itunes from discs that have flaws which cause audible dropouts, skips, etc. and the Itunes error correction creates files which play flawlessly.

There is no EAC or EAC-equivalent for Mac. . . right?
thanks,
bob

Have you compared the file size and the bit rate of the same track that was directly ripped by iTunes into Apple Lossless and the one that was ripped by EAC into WAV and than imported into iTunes and converted into Apple Lossless?

I found that the EAC ones almost always have a slightly higher bit rate and larger size. I don't know what caused the difference but the EAC ripped tracks sound smoother and fuller.

Sounds like belt-and-suspenders to me. Apple Lossless is exactly that--lossless. I think John Atkinson at Stereophile confirmed that a while back (and I bet he used EAC to do it).

If you use iTunes be sure you check "error correction when reading Audio CDs" I've got to believe that this is a similar, if perhaps less rigorous implementation of the same idea - works for me

By all reckoning, iTunes is pretty good. EAC is about as close to perfect as you can get, if used in secure mode. For audiophools bent on discerning the differences between maple and mahogany conical footers, EAC being marginally better than iTunes as a ripper is a no-brainer.

Seriously, the big difference is that EAC re-reads, compares, re-reads again until its satisfied that what is in the buffer is what is on the disk. Unknown what iTunes does, but since that is probably overkill for almost everyone, it probably does not do that.