I've used EAC for years and just started using dbPoweramp and learned some things about both products.
1) EAC is free, dbPowerAmp costs a modest amount. 2) Both can rip directly to FLAC with metadata tags. 3) EAC uses freedb for metadata, dbPoweramp uses 4 metadata sources. and "perfectmeta" algorithm to resolve conflicts in the metadata. 4) dbPoweramp gets album art, EAC doesn't. 5) EAC can rip a CD to a single WAV file + CUE sheet, dbPoweramp can't. 6) Both incorporate AccurateRip. 7) Both rip with the same degree of accuracy (limited by errors reading the disk) 8) dbPoweramp has a much smarter ripping algorithm than EAC that dramatically speeds up ripping poor quality CDs. The final point is the reason I purchased dbPoweramp. I check CDs out of the library and rip them. Most of them are in fairly poor condition. If you run EAC in secure mode and it gets hard read errors, it can take hours to finish a rip. If you run it in fast or burst mode, it won't retry and may get errors on sectors that would have been OK if it re-read them a few times. dbPoweramp, on the other hand process each track separately. It first does a fast read and compares the result with AccurateRip data. If it matches it moves on. If not (or if there's no AccurateRip data), it reads that one track in secure mode. If there are no errors, it moves on. Otherwise it rereads only the sectors that had errors to see if the errors can be corrected by re-reading. If there are still errors, it reports them and moves on. The phases and number of passes are user-configurable. Regards, Kim -- krochat ------ Acourate -> Inguz DSP -> SB3 -> GW Labs DSP (96kHz upsampler) -> Apogee Big Ben -> TacT RCS 2.2X -> 2x TacT S2150 -> Vandersteen 3a Signature + TacT W210 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ krochat's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=6579 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=53344 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
