FLAC Ripping

FLAC is the Free Lossless Audio Codec. It is lossless compression, meaning all of the audio fidelity is preserved at the cost of file size (as opposed to MP3, which is lossy and compresses very tightly). Usually, FLAC files are 50% of the original, uncompressed wav, but they sound exactly the same. A correct analogy would be a BMP or TIFF image, or ZIP file, as opposed to JPEG's, which are lossy. FLAC is similar to Ape (Monkey's Audio) in filesize and time to compress, but has been developed under the GPL as free software, which means there are more platforms supporting it. Winamp plugins for FLAC exist (check RareWares).

First, download the FLAC command line encoder here. Install it to some directory (the EAC directory will do.)

Now, in EAC, press F11 to get to the Compression Options dialog, and click the External Compression tab. In the Parameter Passing Scheme menu, select User Defined Encoder and specify .flac as the extension. Click Browse to browse for the FLAC encoder executable that you downloaded.

In the additional command line options box, type the following, exactly as you see it here:

For normal encoding (recommended):

%s %d

For BEST (but slow) encoding:

--best %s %d

For FAST (but weak) encoding:

--fast %s %d

Be sure to uncheck id3 tags in the id3 tag tab of the same dialog. id3 tags are only meant for mp3's and will screw up flac files.