EAC for Mac

[b17466]

Is there anything like EAC for Mac ?
I've got xACT does it do the same thing

[thisistoto]

you can use iTunes, and check that one box for more secure ripping or something.


its not as exact as EAC though, or I think its not.

[ffooky]

If you have a drive that caches audio (here's an old list of features (http://users.pandora.be/satcp/eacoffsets01.htm#-) that may include your drive) which is very likely as most modern units do, then you will not be able to make full use of the error correction routines within cdparanoia or cdda2wav w/lib paranoia that the best OS X rippers, xACT & Max, use.

Assuming your drive does indeed cache audio, the best policy is to make multiple rips with the above apps and compare checksums. If they match then that's the best you can do and is highly likely to mean that your rip is OK. I'd recommend xACT over Max purely because its log is much, much easier to read and will quickly alert you to any problems. I also think Max's GUI is a dog's breakfast but that's just my prejudice :)

EAC will run extremely well under Virtual PC and that's currently the only way to achieve 100% secure rips though the situation is bound to improve.

[AAR.oner]

b17466--use xACT...do *not* use iTunes [even with error correction enabled]--it isn't nearly as accurate as xACT...

[U2Lynne]

Yeah, do not use iTunes to rip the CD. Someone did some testing with it and showed that it was not a very accurate way to rip the audio. Also, a nice thing about xACT is that you can rip straight to flac (or shn). Then you can go to the Util tab and do a Batch Rename to put all the tracks into a standard naming format (bandYYYY-MM-DDd0xt0x.flac). I would save the log file that xACT spits out and just include it in any torrent you have.

[Sugarkane]

This is good to know.

[bigtyke66]

One other thing about xACT is that Scott Brown (who developed xACT) does not recommend ripping to aiff (see posts in the Yahoo xACT group).

I've found that the aiffs ripped by xACT behave a bit weird. For example, I can't recode them back to flac with xACT without taking them through another program (eg. the export audio command in Toast).

[b17466]

Thank you everyone for your replies. My first run in with a bad CD was a new Climax Blues Live FM CD I got from Amazon and when I had itunes rip it for my ipod it started choking on it I did the error correction check box and it still choked. xACT said the last three songs had problems. I had read about EAC a little in a couple of different forums and it sounded like it tries harder. The CD (looked) flawless I just sent it back for exchange. I've only been doing the bit torrent thing for a few months and haven't traded anything yet but I thought I'd ask. I have a couple external drives so I keep all my original flacs so I wouldn't have to re extract anything. Always looking to learn something new.

Thanks

[ffooky]

Also, a nice thing about xACT is that you can rip straight to flac (or shn).

Lynne, how do you do this ? The only way I can see is to have the tracks on the disc in the encode window which is the equivalent of dragging from disc to Finder...the ripper in xACT never gets a sniff of them this way so you don't get a log or any indication of errors. Max does the straight to FLAC thing but it's very definitely no quicker than ripping and then encoding...if anything it's slower.

[U2Lynne]

I open up xACT, go to the encode tag, drag the files from my CD to the window and hit encode. I had assumed this would use cdda2wav to create the wav first and then spit out the flac file. But, I guess I could be assuming incorrectly. I wonder if Scott would like to make the application do that (go through cdda2wav) if it isn't currently doing so.

Interesting sig, ffooky. :D

[ffooky]

I'm pretty sure that it's just a finder-rip job with that method. Firstly, the disc is not unmounted during the process and if you fire up Activity Monitor while it's underway, aifc2wav appears as the active process. I think it'd be a nice addition if it could do as you expected...Max can do so but I consider that application very much a "for private consumption" affair.

Much like my sig ;)