At the risk of gushing, I'd like to say a 'few' words about EAC...

Exact Audio Copy is the most treasured tool in my digital music toolbox. It has gained a deserved reputation as the highest quality "ripper" in the Windoze world. But a lot of folks fail to realize that that is only one of its features, and that it is so much more...

Unlike ordinary "rippers", EAC performs high quality, verified ("secure") Digital Audio Extraction. It accomplishes this by reading every sector of an audio CD at least twice (more if the two reads do not match exactly). Given the inherent weakness of the error correction built into audio CDs (data CDs devote nearly 100M more per CD to error correction/detection and positioning than do audio CDs), I consider it both reckless and foolish to trust the task of DAE to anything less. If you've ever edited WAV files, you know that sometimes the most visually obvious anomalies are inaudible while the audible anomalies can often be the trickiest to see. And so it is with audio CDs: you can't tell the condition of an audio CD by looking at it. So it is risky business to rely upon a "ripper" that blindly trusts whatever data it receives from a CD reader that's acting as if DAE is some kind of competition in which speed is the sole criterion. When doing DAE, haste truly makes waste...

Some people complain that EAC is too slow. They undoubtedly have old (or cheap) CD-ROM drives that are really not well-suited to doing DAE in the first place! My drives do not cache audio data and do (more or less reliably) provide C2 error information, and accomplish secure DAE in the 5X - 10X range. This means an entire album's data can be extracted in 5 - 10 minutes. Compared to how long it would take to try to otherwise verify the validity of the extracted data, and also how much time will be spent subsequently processing (not to mention enjoying) the extracted data, I think EAC is a genuine bargain, time-wise!

In fact, if I'm not in a hurry, I usually turn off the C2 recognition feature -- this makes the extraction take twice as long, but since all drives' C2 error detection can occasionally be fooled, it is slightly more reliable to actually read each and every sector [at least] twice, just to be sure, especially on discs that are at all dirty or scratched or delaminating.

If you care about quality, you owe it to yourself to try EAC, which does not require the usual Windoze installation -- just unzip it and run it.

Here are some of the features EAC (which is postcardware, by the way) provides:

1. Highest quality DAE - as free from read errors as possible, and when impossible, it pinpoints the "suspicious" section(s) for you to listen to, and also examine and correct in its
2. Built in WAV file editor - everything you need, and then some! Fade in, fade out, interpolate, append, spectral view, frequency analysis, normalization, DC offset correction, glitch removal, smoothing, pop detection and locating, noise profiling/reduction, equalizer, special effects (echo, phaser, reverb...), etc.
3. Full CDDB support - insert a CD, press a button, and the artist/album/song information is known and retained in EAC's database. Further, EAC can export this data in a variety of ways -- even such that the standard Windoze CD player will recognize your CDs and display the information. And if you ever find an error in the CDDB database, you can submit the correction with a single click (though I become hesitant to do this until I switched EAC over to freedb.org).
4. Full MP3 compressor support - EAC can perform batch compression of WAV files using any codec you have.
5. Compare WAV files - EAC can verify that files are (not) identical. This is very handy for making sure EAC's drive offsets are set correctly, which will permit you to obtain identical DAE from different drives and also make offset-corrected writes, which means your copies can be bit-perfect, something that very few products actually deliver, despite the fact that this is the "holy grail" of digital audio.
6. Full support for CD-Text - so your custom creations will know their own names...
7. Gap detection - EAC can perform precise gap detection for you -- no more worrying about which tracks have gaps between them and which don't.
8. MP3 ID3 tag editor - Makes it easy to edit a bunch of ID3 tags.
9. Rename from ID3 tags - In addition to complete control over file naming, EAC can rename your MP3s according to their ID3 tag info.
10. WAV file recorder - Captures to disk whatever audio source you feed to your sound card (radio, LPs, tapes, etc). It has very nice volume level meters, to minimize any need to subsequently normalize the volume, which, of course, EAC can also do.
11. Full support for standard CUE sheets - (compatible with other programs) for full control over gap sizes, CD-Text, indices, etc. when it
12. Burns audio CDs - Why not? It does practically everything else...!