Overview
Good
Provides a perfect audio grabber technology that allows you to perfectly copy audio from a CD or DVD, with jitter correction. Helps you to pinpoint any error in the audio CD by telling you which time position the problem occurred.
Bad
It is free only for non-commercial purposes. The user interface looks old and outdated.
Overall
Allows you to grab any audio from a CD or DVD with good accuracy and audio correction technology, saving a lot of time listening to each audio one by one. Gives you an easy way to edit your audio tracks with the simple wave editor.
Detailed Review
Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is an audio grabber software created and developed by Andre Wiethoff, a software developer based in Germany. The developer has finished his computer science and mathematics study at University of Dortmund, and he has worked with several software companies in the past. The developer uses Stony Brook Modula-2 that runs in Windows 10 to develop this audio grabber software.
Advanced Extraction Technology To Ensure Flawless Audio Grabbing
The thing that makes Exact Audio Copy different from other similar software is the extraction technology that it uses. The software uses the advanced extraction technology which allows you to get the flawless audio from the CD or DVD that you want to extract. The audio is the exact copy of the original, and you don’t get any loss of quality in the extracted audio files. The software is capable of doing this because it reads your CD or DVD many times before it comes with the extracted audio files. This is why the extracted audio quality is accurate and flawless, since it inspects the CD or DVD thoroughly before extracting the audio files.
Hidden Sector Synchronization
The biggest problem with most audio grabber software is that the software doesn’t have any mechanism to ensure that the bad audio files within any bad sectors are read properly. This software allows you to perform the hidden sector synchronization, which is to ensure that all correctable errors within the bad sector, which makes the audio to lose quality, is corrected in the extraction process. Even though there are some really bad errors in the audio files that can’t be corrected, the software tells you at which time position the errors occurred, so that you can anticipate it. This is a problem that often happens when you try to extract audio from a scratched or damaged CD or DVD.
Three Main Extraction Methods Available
Depending on your needs, Exact Audio Copy can perform three different extraction methods, and the audio quality that you get from each extraction method is also different. The first method is the burst extraction method. The burst extraction method quickly extracts your audio files without any synchronization. The second method is the fast extraction method. This method helps you to extract your audio quickly, just like the burst method, but with the jitter correction process applied. The third method is the secure extraction method, which extracts your audio files thoroughly, giving you the best audio quality.
Various Additional Features
While the main function of this software is to extract or grab audio files from the CD or DVD media, it is not limited only to audio tracks. There are also other features offered by this software, which is usually not available in other similar software, such as extraction of various music data, CD player functionality, preview of the selected audio data ranges, tag editor, automatic drive feature detection, batch conversion, and more. These features add more functionalities to the software, allowing you to work with your extracted audio files without leaving the software.
Simple Wave Editor Included
The extracted audio files can be obtained in the WAV file format, which is the best audio format to work with. The good thing about Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is that this software also provides a simple wave editor that allows you to do various things to your WAV files. The wave editor is a simple software added to the main software with various functionalities, such as pop detection, noise reduction, interpolation of ranges, glitch removal, trim and normalize, fade in/out, and more. It allows you to work further with your extracted audio files and make the audio quality better.
Conclusion
If you are looking for a simple and powerful audio grabber software with various features to use, as well as a free license, then Exact Audio Copy is the best software for you to use. Other similar free audio grabber software doesn’t give as good features, as well as advanced audio extraction technology, as this one. With this software, you are not only allowed to extract audio files from CD or DVD, but you are also allowed to edit your extracted files to enhance the audio quality. Moreover, the extracted audio files that you get are flawless without any loss in quality from the original, unless the audio is extracted from bad sectors, in which case the software can fix the errors in the audio if it can be corrected. It’s a handy little audio grabber tool that you can rely on anytime.