Exact Audio Copy - EAC - help, tips and tricks thread

I see a number of one-off questions on Exact Audio Copy (EAC) come up every so often. Maybe we can collect them together in one thread.

* * *

My question --

The extraction report lists Track Quality for each ripped track (out of 100.0%). At what percentage do you have audible issues with the rip? At what percentage do you decide to double check your CD, or run a second rip to see if you can get better results?

I often get 99.9% or 99.8% on clean CDs. Below that I'll check the CD's playing surface to see if there is any dust or mark, and may run a second rip of the CD. Many times, without doing anything to the CD itself, even a 99.6% track can come out at 100.0% on the second rip.

The few times I've had a problem disc or seen Track Quality below 99.0%, the report noted a "suspicious position" for the track. So there was clearly something wrong with the disc.

Thanks in advance.

 

what do these numbers mean?
I'm talking about the last two columns.

 

In case anyone needs it, I've found this to be an excellent guide for setting up EAC to make rips as perfect as possible (and properly make a duplicate).

http://xs.vc/eac/

 

This is from HydrogenAudio

Getting less than 100% just means EAC re-read sectors but that doen't mean you didn't get the same audio that the cd has. Have you tried compared checksums between a file you extracted with 100% and the one of the same file with less than 100% (but with no errors)?

 

The track quality does not say anything about the quality of the extraction, only about the difficulties EAC had reading that track. The EAC report will tell you if the extraction was error-free ("No errors occurred") or if there were uncorrectable errors ("There were errors").

 

I think this thread will be a great help for all of us who (happily) use EAC but may not be getting all of the benefits from it or use all the features we could.

Thanks!

 

I appreciate that EAC is considered the creme de la creme of audio extractors, but how does other software compare? I have a few different playback/rip programmes installed and I'm reluctant to add another to my already stretched pc unless I know I'm going to greatly appreciate the benefits of doing so.

How do Winamp/Realplayer/Nero compare?

 

I like Nero and CDR's/DVD sound/look pretty damm good to me.

 

The first of those two is the size of the uncompressed audio data of each track in megabytes. The second is EAC's estimate of the size it'll be with the compression you've set up (if any, in this case it looks like you haven't).

Nero, RealPlayer and Winamp are not great rippers. They'll do a good job most of the time but they're missing the main thing people use EAC for - secure ripping. Basically it just means if there's a problem with the rip they won't notice or report it let alone correct it.

 

I'd like to know how to translate the peak levels in EAC (expressed in %) in peak levels in other sound programs, like Adobe Audition (expressed in dB). Is there a simple way to do this?

 

Easy logarithmic relationship:

[Peak level in dB] = 20 * log10([Peak level in %] / 100)

[Peak level in %] = 100 * 10^([Peak level in dB] / 20)

Note that the % number varies between 0 and 100, and the dB number varies between negative infinity and 0.

Rules of thumb:

0 dB = 100%
-0.05 dB = 99.4%
-0.1 dB = 98.9%
-0.2 dB = 97.7%
-0.3 dB = 96.6%
-0.4 dB = 95.5%
-0.5 dB = 94.4%
-0.6 dB = 93.3%
-0.8 dB = 91.2%
-1 dB = 89.1%
-1.5 dB = 84.1%
-2 dB = 79.4%
-2.5 dB = 75.0%
-3 dB = 70.8%
-4 dB = 63.1%
-5 dB = 56.2%
-6 dB = 50.1%
-8 dB = 39.8%
-10 dB = 31.6%
-12 dB = 25.1%
-15 dB = 17.8%
-20 dB = 10.0%
-25 dB = 5.6%
-30 dB = 3.2%
-40 dB = 1.0%

 

Express the peak level as a decimal (so 0.95 instead of 95%) and then do:

dB value = 20 x log (base 10) [decimal value]

e.g., a value of 50% = 0.5 results in a dB value of -6.0205..., which is usually expressed as -6 dB.

[Edit] Damn, beaten to the punch!

 

and "^" stands for...

 

To the power of.

For example, 1000 = 10^3

 

Sorry, that's "raised to the power of". Like: 10^3 = 1000.

I would have used "exp", but I'm sure that would have been even more confusing...

[Edit] Damn! Beaten to the punch!

 

you're good, both of u.
thanks, i'll make sure to save those posts

 

What use would you give to that info? As far as I know peak levels shows the highest peak in a track, but you never know where or how many peaks like that you've got

 

The EAC peak info is useful for comparing two CD to determine if they use the same mastering. If the EAC peak levels are the same for all of the tracks, then the odds are pretty good that it's the same mastering.

Obviously, this doesn't work so well if all the tracks peak at 100% or something like that.

What I'd really like to see from EAC is the peak level, and the number of samples that hit that peak level. If the peak is -3 dB, but there are millions of samples that all hit the -3 dB level, then there's probably some clipping/limiting going on. I don't know of any tools that can give that info, though.

 

hi quarzo, welcome.
you'll see that, in this neighborhood, peak levels are very often used to recognize different editions of a record.

edit: and someone was way quicker than me...

 

I've seen comparisons going on based on peak levels but just wondered why you needed to translate it to db

 

Most don't, but there are some other programs that give values in dB, like CDex.

 

Some programs, such as Adobe Audition, allow you to change the scale used. In Audition, just right-click on the scale and choose the one you want.

 

can you change it in the "stats sur l'amplitude" window (peak level stats?)

 

Good idea for a thread! I can't remember myself, but someone should put in here about EAC and pre-emphasis. There are two ways a CD can be marked if it has PE. Older versions of EAC "see" both versions. But newer versions miss the one in the subcodes (correct?). At what version of EAC did that change? That would be useful.