Exact Audio Copy
Exact Audio Copy(EAC for short) is a free software that can be used to extract tracks from an Audio CD to your computer's hard disk. What makes EAC special compared to other rippers is the fact that it is capable of reading audio CDs almost perfectly. EAC uses various mathods for extracting audio data.
In "Secure Mode", the program reads every audio sector at least twice, hence detecting non-identical sectors. If an error occurs (read or sync error), the program keeps on reading this sector, until eight of 16 retries are identical, but at maximum one, three or five times (according to the error recovery quality) these 16 retries are read. So, in the worst case, bad sectors are read up to 82 times! But this will help the program to obtain best result by comparing all of the retries. If it is not sure that the stream is correct (at least it can be said at approx. 99.5%) the program will tell the user where the (possible) read error occurred. The program also tries to adjust the jitter artefacts that occur on the first block of a track, so that each extraction should be exactly the same. On drives found to have the "accurate stream" feature, this is guaranteed. Of course, this is a little bit more complex, especially with some CD drives which have caching. When these drives cache audio data, every sector read will be read from cache and is identical. However, In the current beta version (when the program is properly configured), the cache will be reset by resetting the drive completely. This is the reason why the reading is so slow in "Secure Mode".
