EAC & LAME for top quality CD to MP3s - 2 great guides

[Rick Nebiolo]

The recent What program on your PC do you use for music thread on OOT finally inspired me to look beyond Musicmatch for converting my CDs to MP3s. I had read that Exact Audio Copy (EAC) was supposed to be the best ripper (CD to .wav files), but it seemed intimidating until I found the this guide.

This sets up EAC so it dumps the output to LAME (supposedly the best .wav to MP3 encoder). The guide was easy to follow and the results so far have been excellent. I used the 320 bit rate setting, but somehow LAME encodes in a VBR format, using the higher 320 bit rate only when it needs to. Very efficient in terms of filespace and sound quality.

Later I found another guide to EAC that seemed equally well written. I haven't tried this guide yet but I noticed it included information on how to auto-dump the EAC .wav output into programs that will convert to FLAC and other formats.

Am still using Musicmatch 7.5.1070 for desktop computer playback but am looking for a less bloated player, perhaps an older version (available at www.oldversion.com) of WinAmp combined with a skin that allows me to re-size the window so my 51 year old eyes can see the text.

Anyway, if anyone knows of any better guides for EAC/MP3/FLAC and so on let me know. The Hydrogenaudio Forums are a bit over my head. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

Happy New Year!

~ Rick