EAC Ripping Guide

2. CD Information

• In most cases, EAC will automatically get CD information from freedb when you insert a CD into the drive you have selected. Track titles, CD Title, CD Artist, etc will show in the EAC main window.

However, if you have not supplied an e-mail address in the freedb/Database Options, the server connection will not work. Also, if you have not checked "On unknown CDs: automatically access online freedb database" in EAC Options/General, the information will not appear automatically.

• Once you have supplied an e-mail adress, you can "manually" make EAC retrieve information about the CD by clicking "Get CD Information From...Remote freedb" in the Database menu .

If there is no information because EAC failed to contact freedb, choose "freedb/Database Options" in the EAC menu. In the popup window, click "Get active freedb server list":

If there is no information because your CD is not in the database (or if you can't establish a connection with freedb), add the information manually, see Editing CD Information below.

• If you are about to rip a CD with various artists, check the "Various Artists" checkbox.

A special scheme is used for the track titles for various artists: first the artist name, then a blank space, then a slash followed by another blank space, and finally the track title. When you have checked the "Various Artists" checkbox, EAC will interpret this as intended: the first part, before the slash, will be used as the "Artist" when the files are named according to the various artist file naming scheme you set up in the EAC Options/Filename tab.

Check all the CD information against the album artwork. If the artwork and the CD information shown in EAC differ, you need to edit the CD information in EAC.

• If the first track shows up in red, see Appendix A: Hidden Tracks.

Once in a while there will be more than one entry for a CD, and you will have to choose one of the alternatives:

If the CD information for the alternative you chose is incorrect, you can try one of the other alternatives to see if it's better. Click the Database menu and choose "Get CD Information From... Remote freedb" to see the choices again.

You can also try with "Get CD Information From... CDText", if your drive is capable of reading it. (Note that you need to check "CD-Text Read capable drive" in 5c. Offset/Speed, or this option will be greyed out in the menu.) Then EAC will try to read the information directly from the CD.

Check all the CD information against the album artwork. If the artwork and the CD information shown in EAC differ, you need to edit the CD information in EAC.

2a. Editing CD Information

If you can't get CD information from the database or the CD text, or if the information you got from freedb does not match the album artwork, you have to edit the CD information.

• Type the correct information into the boxes for CD Title, CD Artist, Year, Genre and freedb. If you rip a multi-CD album, remember to call the first CD "CD 1", the next one "CD 2", etc, but keep the rest of the CD information (except the track titles, of course) the same. In order to edit a track title, you need to select it (left-click) and then hit F2:

Do not add track numbers to the titles. They will be added to the file names in proper fashion if you have set up EAC to do so in the EAC Options/Filename tab.

• If all the track titles are missing in EAC, you can type the whole track list, one track per line, in Notepad or some other text editor, then copy and paste it into EAC. This will save you from having to click and hit F2 for each track, but you will have to add CD Artist and CD Title, as well as Year and Genre, manually. You can of course also copy a track list found online. Make sure that the list is for the right release, so that you do not end up with incorrect track titles. Also, the track titles in the list must of course be in the correct order and should not contain track numbers.

• Copy the list to the clipboard by selecting all the tracks in the list and then hitting "Ctrl + C". Then go to the EAC main window, click "Get CD Information From... - Clipboard" in the Database menu:

• "Various Artists" track titles are sometimes submitted to the databases in the format common for file names (Artist - Title) instead of the Artist / Title format that EAC needs in order to be able to distinguish artists from track titles. EAC contains a tool that saves you the trouble of having to type correct titles in such cases:

Continue to 3. Detect Gaps