Brian's CD-AUDIO Extraction Guides

I have put this page together for a few friends that asked how I made my high-quality MP3 backups of my personal CD collection. I like to have a variety of music in my truck as I drive around town, and when I am at work trying to tone out the cubicle-farm noise. Due to space limitations in my truck, and outright theft of my original CDs at work I have resorted to MP3 ripping my collection.

These little movie snapshots give you a quick tour of how to setup the software, and do a proper VBR-MP3 extraction. I then archive my converted CD MP3 files to DVD with checksum files and then lock away my original CDs at home. If I lose/damange an MP3 disc, or some loser at work steals it, I can just pull the files from my DVD master backup and make another, without having to go back and re-rip the original. This information is a bit dated since I put it together in 2006, but pretty accurate even with numerous version changes. I've tried to add quick notes on new versions that could be handy when looking at the older Flash movies.

Links to MP3 software : [v1.8 - May'12 ] : You will need to go grab all of this software before you can begin.
Configure Exact Audio Copier : [v1.5 - Jan'06 ] : This will walk you through some basic setup of EAC. It covers setting up your CD/DVD drives for extraction, configuring EAC to use an external LAME encoder, and then the basic process of convering CD-Audio to MP3 format.

NOTE #1: If your EAC is not detecting your CDROMs, goto options menu and change from external ASPI to builtin, and restart. If this works, flip it back to external, restart, if it is still not seeing your drives, then copy the WNASPI32.DLL from your Nero directory into the root of the EAC directory. This fixed my problem when one day my machine decided to stop seeing drives in EAC.

NOTE#2: Win7x64 users may need to run-as administrator when using EAC versions below v1.x, I still use v0.99 and v1.03.x right now until I decide the newer one is better.
Install AccurateRIP : [v1.0 - Jan'06 ] : This is a MUST install option after doing the initial EAC setup. Loading this DLL into the EAC will insure your CD rips are 100% accurate, comparing against 1000s of other people on an internet database.
Install CueTools DataBase plugin for EAC 1.03+ : The new EAC 1.03+ can support both AccurateRip and CTDB plugin to double-insure your rip was accurate. Also see Gakuon CTDB setup page for more information.
Rip and convert to MP3 : [v1.0 - Apr'05 ] : This will walk you through a basis CD-RIP and conversion to MP3 using LAME.
Verify MP3 quality and tagging : [v1.0 - Apr'05 ] : This will walk you through verifying the MP3 quality, and to insure that the ID3 tags are proper and complete.
Create EncSpot report : [v1.0 - Apr'05 ] : This will walk you through the creation of an EncSpot quality report.
Create checksum files for archive : [v1.0 - Apr'05 ] : This will walk you through the process of creating and verify the PAR2 parity-checksum files. Once these files have been created, technically you can fix any file in a CD set if they become damage later. If properly configured, you can even recover an entire missing MP3 track from the CD.

NOTE: I am now using MultiPAR on my Win7x64 boxes because QuickPAR doesn't play well anymore, otherwise I still use it on my WinXP boxes.