6. The Ripping Process
It can take anything from 15 minutes to several hours to rip a CD, depending on your drive, the length of the CD and how much EAC has to work with correcting errors. You can follow the process as EAC rips the CD, with estimated information for both the track that EAC is currently testing or copying and the whole CD. If there are imperfections on the CD, which would normally lead to imperfect rips, EAC tries to correct the errors. The ripping process may go very slow during error correction. That is a good thing - it means that EAC is doing its job properly.
Do not shut down EAC as soon as EAC says "Audio Extraction Complete". Remember that flac.exe compresses the tracks to FLAC after EAC has ripped them to .wav, so it's safest not to shut down EAC when you can see that compression is still taking place:
- When the rip ("Audio Extraction") is complete and the compression has finished, too, click "OK".