Developer(s) Andre Wiethoff Size 5.0 MB | Development status Active | |
Initial release 25 June 1998;
18 years ago (1998-06-25) Stable release 1.3 / 3 September 2016;
5 months ago (2016-09-03) Operating system | ||
Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is a CD ripping program for Microsoft Windows. It has also been tested to work under newer versions of Wine on Linux. This program was created by Andre Wiethoff in 1998, while he was a student at the University of Dortmund in Germany, stating he became "fed up with other audio grabbers", and decided to develop his own.
Contents
Exact Audio Copy is proprietary freeware, free for non-commercial use, and popular among audiophiles for its accuracy and ability to rip slightly damaged audio compact discs.
Overview
EAC is used to convert the tracks on standard audio CDs to WAV files, which can then be transcoded into other formats. These include lossy ones such as MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, or lossless ones such as ALAC, FLAC, or WavPack using external encoders. It also has the option of using the Windows Audio Compression Manager (ACM Codecs) for direct compression. It supports AccurateRip, which automatically compares the copy with rips made by others, and can automatically create cue sheets, with all gaps, track attributes, ISRC, and CD-Text included. EAC also supports automatic ID3 tagging using Internet-based databases such as freedb, GD3 (see below), or a local database.
If there are uncorrectable errors the software reports the error location.
History
In release 1.0b1, EAC supported the downloading of CD cover art, and in b2, an option was added to have the ID3 information, such as artist, CD title, track names, and cover art downloaded automatically from the GD3 database. The GD3 option allowed a user who set up an account to make 10 free initial queries, but afterwards required them to pay a fee of US$7.99, after which they could make an unlimited number of queries. Release 1.0b1 removed support for Windows 2000 and older versions of Windows.
Version 1.1 was released on 2 July 2016.
Version 1.2 on 13 August 2016 provides mainly bug fixes for the CDRDAO component and updates the cover search in the freedb++ plugin. There are some more minor bugs fixed and the handling of track selection again modified.
Version 1.3 was released as a hotfix on 5 September 2016 to fix some issues with version 1.2.