MPC Ripping

MPC is a format developed to compete with MP3 technically, as opposed to Ogg Vorbis, which was developed to be an open source alternative. Zealots swear by MPC as a superior format; crowning the compression champion is not something I care about, so have fun testing it yourself. In any case, it encodes way faster than MP3 and produces slightly smaller files.

First, download the MPC 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 .mpc as the extension. Click Browse to browse for the mpc encoder executable that you downloaded.

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

--quality 6 --xlevel --verbose --ape2 --artist "%a" --title "%t" --album "%g" --year "%y" --track "%n" --genre "%m" --comment "EAC Secure / --quality 6 --xlevel" %s

(Instead of --quality 6, you can substitute --xtreme or --insane. Quality 6 is roughly equivalent to lame --aps, while xtreme is more like --ape. Insane is just silly and is probably more like mp3 256 CBR.)

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 mpc files.