18
Dec/11

Installing rTorrent (+ ruTorrent or wTorrent) on Mac OS X

by under Mac

Guide changelog
2010-02-20 – v1.0 – First version
2011-09-09 – v1.1 – Added section on installing ruTorrent; updated second screenshot to include System Tools; changed MacPorts download links to a single link to their download repository; removed redundant part about manually installing xmlrpc-c
2011-10-15 – v1.2 – Added a few lines in ยง4.1 on creating a session directory for rTorrent (so it doesn’t forget your torrents when quitting and restarting)

Disclaimer
This guide is based on my experience with another guide. It’s something of a work in progress and certainly isn’t foolproof. However, nothing should go disastrously wrong if you at least follow the guide correctly. If something doesn’t work for you, post here and I will try to help (but no guarantees that I can offer any). Note also: I’m running Mac OS X 10.6, so if you’re running Lion, Leopard or Tiger then you may need to tweak parts of this guide for it to work.

This guide will (hopefully) allow you to get rTorrent and, if you like, ruTorrent or wTorrent up and running on Mac OS X. rTorrent is a text-based client; it comes with no GUI (though it’s still perfectly usable) but there are various graphical front-ends for it, two of which are ruTorrent and wTorrent. To install rTorrent, we’ll be using MacPorts. This requires the developer tools found on your Mac OS X installation disc.

1. Installing the Developer Tools
If you’ve already installed the Developer Tools, you can skip ahead to section 2

First things first: insert your Mac OS X installation disc into your Mac. Open up the disc in Finder, open the Optional Installs folder and open Xcode.mpkg, like so:

Continue through the installer until you get to the screen that lets you choose what you want to install. Make sure that System Tools and UNIX Dev Support are ticked:

Click Continue and carry on with the installation process. After a (possibly long) while, the Developer Tools should be successfully installed.

2. Installing MacPorts
This is pretty simple, really. Download MacPorts by getting the latest version for your system from here: https://distfiles.macports.org/MacPorts/
Open the .dmg and install MacPorts. There are no options to deal with so no screenshots here.

3. Installing rTorrent
Open up Terminal (if you’ve never used it before, you can find it in the Utilities folder in Applications). To make sure MacPorts is working, issue (that means, type into Terminal and press enter) the following command (throughout this guide, you can copy and paste any commands into Terminal):

port

If MacPorts was installed properly, you should see something like:

MacPorts 2.0.3
Entering interactive mode… (“help” for help, “quit” to quit)
[/your/current/working/directory] >

To leave the interactive mode, issue the command:

quit

We can now install rTorrent. Issue the following command:

sudo port install rtorrent-devel +xmlrpc

It will ask for your password. Type it in (note that it won’t show up as you type it, not even in asterisks or dots; you can still press backspace to delete mistakes though) and press enter. You can now safely go do something else while MacPorts works on downloading and installing rTorrent and all its dependencies. Once it’s finished, you’ll have a working copy of rTorrent! Hurray! You can even start using it right now by issuing the command:

rtorrent

To quit rtorrent, use Ctrl q (i.e. hold down Ctrl and press q). There’s a nicer way to use rTorrent via a program called screen. Issue the following command:

screen rtorrent

It may not look any different to when you issued just ‘rtorrent’ by itself but here’s the clever part: press Ctrl a then d. You should be returned to the command prompt but with the following line above the prompt:

[detached]

screen is a program that effectively lets you create virtual terminals. This is useful because you can now quit Terminal without stopping rTorrent; it will carry on running in the virtual terminal you created, independently of the Terminal app. You can reattach the screen we’ve just made by issuing:

screen -r

This will return you to the screen where rTorrent is running. If you quit rTorrent (Ctrl q), the screen containing rTorrent will also be closed, and you’ll have to issue ‘screen rtorrent’ again to start running it again. At this point, you have a fully functioning text-based BitTorrent client. There are many guides out there describing how to use and configure rTorrent and you can now start making use of them. However, if you’re looking for a nice fancy GUI, read on…

4. Installing a web interface (optional) – pre-installation tweaks
There are various web interfaces that can control rTorrent through a protocol known as XML-RPC. To function, they need web server software. Luckily, Mac OS X comes with Apache, one of the most widely used web server software in the world. However, there is a fair amount of tweaking that needs to be done first (regardless of which interface you wish to use).

4.1 Apache: enabling PHP, installing mod_scgi and other tweaks
Mac OS X’s preinstalled copy of Apache comes with the PHP extension but it’s disabled by default. To enable it, we need to edit a certain text file. At this point, I’m going to assume you have a good text editor like TextMate (paid) or TextWrangler (free). TextEdit has to be constantly told to save files as plain text, and doesn’t have any colour schemes for displaying code, so I don’t recommend using it. The file we’ll be editing is:

/private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

The ‘private’ folder (found at the top level of the drive that Mac OS X is installed to; probably ‘Macintosh HD’) is, as the name suggests, hidden from view in the Finder. However, TextMate and TextWrangler both allow you to see hidden files in their ‘Open’ dialog box. So open the file with one of them and scroll down to line 115. You should see:

#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

The ‘#’ at the beginning of the line means the whole line is treated as a comment; Apache will ignore it and so won’t load the php module that we need to run a web interface. To fix this, simply delete the ‘#’ so that the line becomes:

LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Save the file (you’ll be prompted for your password) but don’t close it, as we’ll be editing it again soon. We now need to install mod_scgi, an extension that isn’t included with Mac OS X. You can do so by issuing the following commands in Terminal in order:

curl -O http://python.ca/scgi/releases/scgi-1.14.tar.gz

tar xf scgi-1.14.tar.gz

cd scgi-1.14/apache2

sudo apxs -i -c mod_scgi.c

This will install mod_scgi (after which you can delete the files that the above commands just downloaded) but, before Apache can start using it, we need to make one last tweak.
Issue the following commands in order:

cd /usr/sbin

sudo mv ./httpd ./httpd.fat

file ./httpd.fat

You should see that the Apache binary is compiled with support for several architectures. If for example you’re running Snow Leopard on a (64-bit) Intel processor, this will probably be displayed as:

./httpd.fat: Mach-O universal binary with 3 architectures
./httpd.fat (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
./httpd.fat (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
./httpd.fat (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O executable ppc

We need to strip the unneeded parts so that Apache can load the scgi module. Which part you need depends on which architecture you’re on. If you’re on a 64-bit capable processor (Intel Core 2 Duo, i5, i7, etc.), you’ll want x86_64. If you’re on the older 32-bit only capable ones (Intel Core Duo, Core Solo, etc.), you’ll want i386. And if you’re on PowerPC, you’ll want ppc7400. Since my MacBook uses an Intel Core 2 Duo, I issue the following commands in order:

sudo lipo ./httpd.fat -thin x86_64 -output ./httpd.x86_64

sudo ln -s ./httpd.x86_64 ./httpd

file ./httpd.x86_64

If you want to keep i386, replace every instance of ‘x86_64′ in the above with ‘i386′, and similarly for ppc. You should be met with something like:

./httpd.x86_64: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64

showing the architecture that you kept.
We can now tell Apache to load the module by editing the file /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf that we edited previously, so open it up again in TextMate/Wrangler. Scroll down to the bottom of the ‘LoadModule’ lines (around line 115) and add this line:

LoadModule scgi_module libexec/apache2/mod_scgi.so

Then, add this line at the bottom of the file:

SCGIMount /RPC2 localhost:5000

This is also a good chance to create a session directory for rTorrent, so issue the following commands in Terminal:

cd

mkdir .session

Then edit line 26 of .rtorrent.rc to tell rTorrent to use this directory ( /Users/username/.session ) as a session directory. In my case, line 26 would read:

session = /Users/Ali/.session

Don’t forget to remove the # at the beginning of the line.

Save the file and quit TextMate/Wrangler. We’re now almost ready to install a web interface. The only thing that remains is to make a certain configuration file for rTorrent.
rTorrent uses a configuration file in your home folder called .rtorrent.rc but there won’t be such a file in your home folder right now. If rTorrent is still running, quit it, as it won’t use the configuration file until it’s been restarted.

You can download an example configuration file from here. Open it up with TextMate/Wrangler and add the following line to the bottom of the file:

scgi_port = localhost:5000

Save the file, then move it to your home folder. Rename it using the Terminal by issuing the following command:

mv rtorrent.rc.txt .rtorrent.rc

We can now install a web interface! Already?! You can now pick which web interface you wish to use. If you have no particular preference, I recommend ruTorrent as it has various plugins available for it and is more regularly updated than wTorrent. You can even download both if you like.

5a.1 Installing ruTorrent
Before doing anything, make sure that rTorrent is running. If you haven’t quit it yet, you can reattach the screen for it by issuing the command:

screen -r

Otherwise you can start it again by issuing the command:

screen rtorrent

Remember that you can detach from this screen by pressing Ctrl a then d.

Now, we need to download ruTorrent to the Sites folder in your home folder and modify its permissions. You can do all this by issuing the following commands in order:

cd ~/Sites

svn co http://rutorrent.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/rutorrent

chmod a+rx rutorrent

To start using ruTorrent, we need to start Apache. This is done most easily by opening up System Preferences and enabling ‘Web Sharing’ in the Sharing pane:

Finally, there’s one last thing to install via MacPorts. Issue the following command in Terminal:

sudo port install proctools

When that’s installed, you can run ruTorrent by pointing your web browser to the following address (depending on your username on Mac OS X):

http://localhost/~username/ruTorrent/

In my case, this is:

http://localhost/~Ali/ruTorrent/

You should now be greeted with a working copy of ruTorrent:

Hurray! You might notice a button with an icon of a star in my screenshot that you won’t have at this point. This button is for a plugin that allows ruTorrent to create torrent files. If you don’t want this functionality, you may stop reading now and go off and use ruTorrent like a giddy schoolgirl. Otherwise, keep reading.

5a.2 Installing the create plugin for ruTorrent
To download the create plugin, issue the following commands in Terminal:

cd ~/Sites/rutorrent/plugins

svn co http://rutorrent.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/create

The create plugin itself can create torrent files but I prefer to just use it as a frontend for another little program called mktorrent, which works a bit better. You can install it using MacPorts with the following command:

sudo port install mktorrent

Now go to the ruTorrent folder (in your home folder’s Sites folder). Open up the plugins folder, then the create folder. In there is a file called conf.php which we need to edit, so open it up with TextMate/Wrangler. Edit the first part of line 6 so that it reads:

$useExternal = ‘mktorrent’;

Then edit the first part of line 12 so that it reads:

$pathToCreatetorrent = ‘/opt/local/bin/mktorrent’;

Now save the file and close it. If you open up ruTorrent now, you’ll be able to see the star icon button for the create plugin. If you click it, you’ll see a box that allows you to specify the path of the folder/file you want to create a torrent out of (plus other options). Specifying the full path of something can be a bit of a pain though, so let’s install the _getdir plugin.

5a.3 Installing the _getdir plugin for ruTorrent
To download the _getdir plugin, issue the following commands in Terminal:

cd ~/Sites/rutorrent/plugins

svn co http://rutorrent.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/_getdir

This plugin doesn’t require any configuring but you might have to modify the permissions of rTorrent’s download directory. I’ve configured rTorrent to download stuff to the Downloads folder in my home folder. You can specify this in the .rtorrent.rc file in your home folder that we created earlier; you’ll need to use TextMate/Wrangler to open the file as it’s hidden in the Finder. The part you need to edit in the .rtorrent.rc file is the following:

# Default directory to save the downloaded torrents.
directory = /Users/Ali/Downloads/

You’ll notice I’ve removed the # at the beginning of the second line (this makes the option enabled) and specified the path of the folder I want rTorrent to download stuff to. If you’re unsure of a folder’s path, you can find out what it is by simply dragging and dropping that folder onto a Terminal window. When you do so, the path of the folder will appear in Terminal, which you can copy & paste into the .rtorrent.rc file.

This is the folder we also need to modify permissions for. You can do this by issuing the following command in Terminal (depending on the path of your download folder for rTorrent):

chmod a+rx path/of/rTorrent/download/folder

In my case, this is:

chmod a+rx ~/Downloads

Once you’ve done this, the create plugin will allow you to choose files/folders by clicking on the small box shown below:

You can go ‘up’ a folder in this box by double-clicking on /.. although you should note that it will only display folders for which it has permission to. If there’s a folder you want to pick with it that isn’t showing up, just modify the permissions for that folder in the same way that we did before, i.e. issue the following type of command:

chmod a+rx path/of/folder

Congrats, you now have a functioning copy of ruTorrent that can even create torrent files! Feel free to explore the other plugins available for ruTorrent if you so wish (see the list at the bottom of this page) but you’ll have to support yourself in using them as I don’t use any other plugins myself.

5b.1 Installing wTorrent
Before doing anything, make sure that rTorrent is running. If you haven’t quit it yet, you can reattach the screen for it by issuing the command:

screen -r

Otherwise you can start it again by issuing the command:

screen rtorrent

Remember that you can detach from this screen by pressing Ctrl a then d.

Now, we need to download wTorrent to the Sites folder in your home folder and modify its permissions. You can do all this by issuing the following commands in order:
cd ~/Sites

svn co svn://wtorrent-project.org/repos/trunk/wtorrent/

chmod a+rx wtorrent

To properly install (and start using) wTorrent, we need to start Apache. This is done most easily by opening up System Preferences and enabling ‘Web Sharing’ in the Sharing pane.

To install wTorrent, you can now point your web browser to the installation file. This is done by entering the following in your browser’s address bar:

http://localhost/~username/wtorrent/install.php

In my case, this is:

http://localhost/~Ali/wtorrent/install.php

You’ll probably find a webpage full of many errors that begin ‘Deprecated: Assigning the return value…’ but if you scroll to the bottom you should see the installation form:


The only thing that needs changing here is the field ‘Default folder to save torrent data’. Change it to the path of the folder you want things to be downloaded to. For example, if you want things to download to the Downloads folder in your home folder, you’d put:

~/Downloads

You also need to enter a username and password under ‘Set wTorrent login’ (not the rTorrent scgi user and password fields). These will have to be entered when you try and open wTorrent, so it’s a layer of security to stop people controlling your torrent client just by knowing your IP address. Once you’ve done that, click the ‘Try configuration’ button and hopefully you’ll get the message “Configuration seems fine, you can save it now.” Do as it suggests and click the ‘Save configuration’ button. You’ll get the message “Configuration file and database created, enjoy wTorrent and don’t forget to delete install.php.” As it suggests, you’ll want to delete the installation file we just used (namely ~/Sites/wtorrent/install.php). Once that’s done, you can start wTorrent. Just point your browser to (note the tilde before “username”; it’s a ~, not a -):

http://localhost/~username/wtorrent/

In my case, this is:

http://localhost/~Ali/wtorrent/

You should now be at the main page of the wTorret interface and can start using it.


5b.2 The ‘Deprecated’ errors
These errors seem to be due to SimplePie, an Atom and RSS parser. Presumably this is what wTorrent uses to handle Atom and RSS feeds. If you’re not in need of this feature, you can effectively disable SimplePie which will get rid of the ‘Deprecated’ errors but will probably break wTorrent’s ability to accept Atom and RSS feeds. Here’s how you do it: in your wTorrent folder open up the file lib/inc/includes.inc.php with TextMate/Wrangler. You should see this as line 32:

require_once( ‘lib/simplepie/simplepie.inc.php’ );

Simply add two forward slashes at the beginning of this line to comment it out:

//require_once( ‘lib/simplepie/simplepie.inc.php’ );

Save the file and refresh wTorrent. All the nasty errors should now have disappeared

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15
Dec/11

Verifying EAC 1.0 Checksums The Easy Way

by under Windows

If you would like to verify the checksum for an EAC 1.0 log and want to avoid using the command line:

- Install EAC 1.0
- Open notepad
- Copy and paste the following three lines into notepad

@echo off
"C:\Program Files\Exact Audio Copy\CheckLog.exe" %1
pause
- Browse to your EAC folder with windows explorer
- Make sure the path in the address bar matches the path in the second line. If it doesn’t, change the second line so it is correct. It will be different if you are running a 64 bit OS or if you changed the default folder EAC installs to.
- Save the file as VerifyChecksum.bat and make sure you have the encoding dropdown box set to ANSI. You may save this bat file wherever you like, the desktop is a convenient place.

Now, whenever you want to verify a checksum, drag the .log file onto this .bat file, a command prompt window will appear and CheckLog will tell you whether the checksum for the log verifies or not.

Alternatively, you can add an entry in your “Send to” menu that appears when you right click a file.
Click on the Start button and type “shell:sendto” into the search bar, if you’re using XP click the Start button, run, and type it in there. This will bring up an explorer window where you can see the entries that already exist and allow you to create new ones. You can copy/move VerifyChecksum.bat into this folder or create a shortcut to wherever you initially created it.
Now you can verify a checksum by simply right clicking a log, selecting Send to, and then VerifyChecksum.bat.
Thanks to ChTiPowA for this idea.

If you have any problems getting this to work or questions relating to the output of CheckLog.exe post in this thread.
note: I can not help with errors related to “unhandled exceptions”

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15
Dec/11

Exact Audio Copy 1.0+ Setup/Ripping Guide

by under Windows

Download link: http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/resources/download/
Current version as of this guide: EAC 1.0 beta 3.

This guide was made for EAC version 1.0 beta 3 and will not completely work with earlier versions. Versions 0.99 or earlier should use the blowfish guide.

Anything with a green outline around it is a required setting. Anything orange is required but depends on your drive. Anything unmarked is optional.

This is meant to be a no-frills guide with little extra info. A more comprehensive (but outdated) guide can be found here:
http://blowfish.be/eac

Step 1: Download and install EAC
Download the installer and fire it up.

Eventually you’ll get to a screen like this. Make sure you install AccurateRip, CDRDAO, CTDB, and freedb as a bare minimum. FLAC will be useful as well if you don’t have it separately installed. GD3 is only useful if you want to pay for metadata results. I assume you don’t.

Step 2: Start EAC

When you first start EAC, you’ll see a screen like this one. Hit “Cancel”. Next, put a popular CD into your drive, preferably not one that was recently released (a few months old at least). You’ll see a window like the one below appear. If you have an older version of EAC or dBpoweramp installed, it’s likely AccurateRip was already configured, and this may not appear.

Hit Configure. It may take a few minutes. Hit “Ok” afterward. Once again, if you have an older version of EAC or dBpoweramp installed, it’s likely AccurateRip was already configured, and this may not appear.

Step 3: EAC Options
All of the options dialogs can be found from the EAC menu at the top of the screen.

Start with EAC Options. Any tabs not pictured are completely optional settings, or are irrelevant to ripping.

Make sure you set the green highlighted settings as shown. If you’re using an older version of EAC, make sure “No use of null samples for CRC calculations is UNCHECKED. The rest is optional, choose as you will. Locking the drive tray during extraction isn’t a bad idea though.

These settings are pretty much all optional and self explanatory. I’d recommend using Alternate CD play routines and disabling autostart though.

The “Create log files always in english language” is very important for our international users. This will let you keep EAC’s language as your native one, but write the log file in English.

If your drive is capable of reading UPC/ISRC codes and CD-Text (you can only really figure this out by trial and error), you’re welcome to keep the top two options checked. Otherwise, uncheck them.

Other than that, these settings are pretty much ideal. I wouldn’t recommend using more than 1 compressor thread even if you have a multicore computer. It doesn’t take very long compared to the track extraction anyway. Note that in tests run by punkmeup, disabling the queue of external compressors in the background fixed an issue where EAC was generating WAV files instead of FLAC, so I’ve made that a required option. It should have no bearing on the rip quality. If rip queueing works for you (it does for me), feel free to leave it enabled.

Friends don’t let friends normalize their EAC rips. Don’t ever do it.

This is the proper way to name tracks. The only difference acceptable here would be perhaps %tracknr2%. %title% if you prefer periods instead of dashes in the filenames. If you need track numbers to go into triple digits for some reason, use %tracknr3% instead.

Naming Convention : %tracknr2% – %title%

Check ‘Use Various Artists Naming Scheme‘ and use : %tracknr2% – %artist% – %title%

Don’t replace spaces by underscores. It looks ridiculous.

A note on directory naming schemes: Don’t use a directory structure here, unless you want to go back and edit your CUE sheet later. When you add a directory to the naming scheme, it’ll put that directory path into the files. Then when someone goes to burn the files in EAC using your cuesheet, they’ll be unable to do so. If you do insist on using a directory structure here, you need to go back, edit the CUE in a program such as notepad, and remove the folder name from each line.

For example, a cuesheet line should look like this:

FILE “01 Last Known Surroundings.wav” WAVE

Not like this:

FILE “C:\EAC Rips\Explosions in the Sky – Take Care, Take Care, Take Care (2011) [FLAC]\01 Last Known Surroundings.wav” WAVE

Step 4: Drive Options

Start by hitting “Detect Read Features…”. This will actually take a few minutes. The only feature detection that actually matters is Accurate Stream. If your drive can use it, checkmark the setting (most modern drives have Accurate Stream). If it can’t, don’t.

Even if your drive doesn’t cache audio, just do us a favour and leave that checked. Not only will it stop you from having to have each of your uploads rescored by hand, but it doesn’t affect the audio quality at all. Yes, the rips take a bit longer with that setting enabled. Go watch TV or something while you wait.

Do not use C2, even if EAC thinks you can. Most drives have terrible C2 error implementation.

Hit “Autodetect read command now”. It shouldn’t take long. Leave everything else unchecked unless you’re having problems. You can checkmark “CD-Text Read capable drive” if you want to test whether your drive can do it. If it can, great, otherwise, uncheck it. It’s unlikely you’ll ever use that feature anyway.

If you did the AccurateRip configuration at the start of this guide, the top half here will be greyed out. If not, you’ll need to find your read offset correction from this list. Don’t use a combined read/write offset.

If you want to figure out whether your drive needs “Overread into Lead-in and Lead-Out” checked, you can check by temporarily unchecking “Use AccurateRip with this drive”. Stick a CD in the drive and hit “Detect read sample offset correction…”. If you’re just doing this for the Overread, see below:

blowfish.be wrote:

Check “Overread Lead-In and Lead-Out” only if the test result says that your drive can overread from both the Lead-In and Lead-Out, or if it says Lead-Out and your offset correction is positive ,or if it says Lead-In and your offset correction is negative. Otherwise disable (uncheck) it.

Remember to check “Use AccurateRip with this drive” again once you’re finished. AccurateRip is always a good idea.

Pretty much every drive should work with the settings shown. If yours stalls on detecting gaps or detects gaps that are obviously wrong (like 30 second gaps on a non-live album), try Detection method B or C. If A, B, and C all fail, you can switch “Secure” to “Accurate” and try again.

Step 5: Metadata Options

Here’s where you pick your metadata provider. If you did install GD3, it’ll be in the list. You can only rip 10 discs before you have to pay for a subscription though. Otherwise, you have a choice between the MusicBrainz plugin (CTDB), freedb plugin and EAC’s native freedb support. I’m not really sure what the big difference is, I’m guessing it’s the cover+lyrics. Anyway, change those settings above if you wish.

If you use EAC’s native freedb instead, the settings should look like this. Make sure you put an email at the top, it doesn’t need to be real. Hit “Get active freedb server list”. Then checkmark the last option.

Step 6: Compression Options

Set up this tab exactly as shown. You’ll have to browse to the path where you have flac.exe, if you installed it with EAC it’s in C:\Program Files (x86)\Exact Audio Copy\FLAC\flac.exe. If you installed it separately it’s wherever you installed it. The bitrate and high/low quality have no effect on the rip.

The commandline parameters have changed in this version, so this will look new to most of you. The commandline recommended for optimal completeness is this:

-8 -V -T “ARTIST=%artist%” -T “TITLE=%title%” -T “ALBUM=%albumtitle%” -T “DATE=%year%” -T “TRACKNUMBER=%tracknr%” -T “GENRE=%genre%” -T “PERFORMER=%albuminterpret%” -T “COMPOSER=%composer%” %haslyrics%–tag-from-file=LYRICS=”%lyricsfile%”%haslyrics% -T “ALBUMARTIST=%albumartist%” -T “DISCNUMBER=%cdnumber%” -T “TOTALDISCS=%totalcds%” -T “TOTALTRACKS=%numtracks%” -T “COMMENT=%comment%” %source% -o %dest%

It takes no extra effort on your part, just copy and paste that into the additional commandline options and you’re done.

Note: the %comment% function is broken in version 1.0b2 (it returns the track CRC). Use something like -T “COMMENT=EAC V1.0 beta 2, Secure Mode, Test & Copy, AccurateRip, FLAC -8″ instead.

Also, as of Beta 3 you may use the %tracknr1% variable instead of %tracknr% if you would like to have no leading zeroes in the track number field (like XLD does). tracknr1 will use, for example, ’1′ instead of ’01′.

A note on the FLAC commandline in versions prior to 1.0b3: If you’re using EAC 1.0b1, use the following commandline for FLAC:
-8 -V -T “ARTIST=%a” -T “TITLE=%t” -T “ALBUM=%g” -T “DATE=%y” -T “TRACKNUMBER=%n” -T “TOTALTRACKS=%x” -T “GENRE=%m” -T “ALBUMARTIST=%v” -T “COMMENT=EAC V1.0 beta 1, Secure Mode, Test & Copy, AccurateRip, FLAC -8″ %s

Anything older than that, just change the version number in the tags.

A note on ripping to lossy formats like MP3: So first off, this is a complete waste of time. In most cases, EAC is overkill for lossy files, and takes far too long to rip the CD to be practical. If your goal is to upload tracks here, your best bet is to rip once to FLAC and then use a program like dBpoweramp to convert that rip to the other formats. Even if you don’t need a FLAC (one already exists on site, or this is for your personal collection only), it’ll still be much faster to rip using any other program, and won’t produce an audibly different result unless your CD has skips and bad scratches.

However, the MP3 and Ogg command lines are included below. You’ll need to browse to LAME.exe or oggenc2.exe, and set the extension to .mp3 or .ogg, respectively. The other settings remain the same, bitrate is still irrelevant.

V0 MP3:
-V 0 –vbr-new –add-id3v2 –ignore-tag-errors –ta “%artist%” –tt “%title%” –tg “%genre%” –tl “%albumtitle%” –ty “%year%” –tn “%tracknr%” %source% -o %dest%

V2 MP3:
-V 2 –vbr-new –add-id3v2 –ignore-tag-errors –ta “%artist%” –tt “%title%” –tg “%genre%” –tl “%albumtitle%” –ty “%year%” –tn “%tracknr%” %source% -o %dest%

320 kbps MP3:
-b 320 -h –add-id3v2 –ignore-tag-errors –ta “%artist%” –tt “%title%” –tg “%genre%” –tl “%albumtitle%” –ty “%year%” –tn “%tracknr%” %source% -o %dest%

q8 Ogg:
-q 8 -a “%artist%” -t “%title%” -l “%albumtitle%” -d “%year%” -N “%tracknr%” -G “%genre%” %source% -o %dest%

Leave everything unchecked except the last option.

Congrats! EAC is now properly set up! You may wish to save your settings in a profile by hitting “New” at the bottom of the screen. However, unless you’re changing your settings frequently there’s no need, EAC will remember all of this on next launch regardless.

Step 7: Tagging


So now let’s look at the main window. Be sure everything is named correctly here, as these will be the tags on your ripped files. If you’re ripping a classical CD, you may wish to fill in the Composer/Performer fields.

Drag a cover image into the EAC window. I think ~500×500 is a decent size in most cases. Google images is your friend here.

If you’re ripping a box set, you may wish to use the options under the cover image, otherwise leave them all as “1″.

Finally, if you want to add lyrics to the tracks, use the “Lyrics” button.

Note: I’ve also highlighted the “New” button where you can save your settings. This is not a necessary step each time you rip.

Step 8: Gap Detection and Cuesheets


The pre-rip stuff happens here. Make sure “Append Gaps to Previous Track (default)” is checked. It should be. Next, hit the options in the order shown.

First, hit “Detect Gaps”. This is very important, your rip will not be perfect if you do not complete this step. If the first track is highlighted in red, you have a hidden track. You’ll want to look at this section of the blowfish.be guide.

Next, go to Create CUE Sheet -> Multiple WAV Files With Gaps… (Noncompliant). This is usually where I create the folder for ripping as well. Do NOT rip your tracks to any directory containing your name. You should NEVER edit a log for any reason, especially now that we have checksums. A simple C:\EAC Rips is fine.

I name my directories as follows:
Artist – Album (Year) [Format] {Extra}

So for example, with the album in the screenshots, it’d be

Sam Roberts Band – Collider (2011) [FLAC] {UMC 0252764577}

However, as long as it contains the album name and no nested folders (don’t do \Artist\Album\), you’re fine by the rules here.

Anyway, make the folder, save the .cue file into it. I usually just name mine Noncompliant.cue, it doesn’t really matter.

Step 9: Ripping

Finally, the rip itself! Make sure all the tracks are checkmarked in the main window unless there are some you don’t want to rip.

Test & Copy -> Compressed.

Depending on your drive and whether or not the CD is scratched, this could take anywhere from ten minutes to four hours. Be patient.

Step 10: Post-Rip

So you’re done! You may wish to use a logchecker to check and make sure your rip is proper, but if you followed this guide, the only possible errors would be with the CD itself. It does happen… some CDs are too badly damaged, even for EAC. Your best bet is to clean the CD and try again.

Other than that, it never hurts to make sure your files are tagged and named properly (though they should be). Any extra stuff you want to include should be added now as well… Additional artwork, an md5 fingerprint, an info.txt file, that sort of thing.

Appendix A: CueTools Plugin (Optional)

This is now installed by selecting “CTDB” in the EAC 1.0b3 options. Therefore, this will only be necessary for EAC 1.0b1 and 1.0b2, or if you want to update the plugin by hand to a newer version.

Starting with version 1.0b1, EAC now supports plugins! While they’ve so far been few and far between, the CueTools plugin is quite handy. Not only does it give you a second opinion past the AccurateRip database and include the CueTools hash in the log, but it also gives you an option to get metadata from MusicBrainz if you prefer it to freedb.

Download page:
http://www.cuetools.net/wiki/CTDB_EAC_Plugin

Installation: Extract the files to EAC’s root directory (containing EAC.exe). Usually this is located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Exact Audio Copy.

Usage: None, it works automatically. You can check whether it’s installed under EAC Options->Audio Plugins. If you wish to use MusicBrainz, go to Metadata Options and select “CUETools DB Metadata Plugin” from the list.

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