Hi folks! Ok, I registered Easy CD DA Extractor today and I've been playing with it for much of the day so thought it time I offered some comparisons with the ripping software I've been using which has been EAC (Exact Audio Copy) and Max (on the Mac and my LINUX system). First and foremost, there is no doubt whatever that Easy CD DA Extractor has come one hell of a long and mighty way since I last tried it some years ago however it still falls short in several areas if accuracy in ripping from CD'S is what you're after and considering that Exact Audio Copy and Max are "freeware" applications and Easy CD DA Extractor isn't then this in my view is some cause for concern. Where the accuracy shortfall occurs is in the fact (it seems) that you cannot set the read and write offsets for your drive, that's very important for CD Ripping and CD burning, now please someone correct me if I'm wrong, I'd in fact relish being wrong because I cannot believe that such a good product as Easy CD DA Extractor wouldn't have this feature. So with that shortcoming out of the way I looked at the various file formats on offer for output. Yep, no doubt again, quite a range but unless I'm not looking thoroughly enough the formats it seems to me aren't customisable. For example let's take MP3 layer 3, all you get when selecting the options are 128K, 256K, 9 levels of VBR etc and that's it. Again, unless I'm missing something then this is a very poor show. So you pick 128K for example, what quality mode is used here for the encoder? Is it stereo, mono or joint stereo the encoder will be encoding in? What sample rate is going to be used? All this information seems to be determined for you and (whilst most will be content to leave things at that) I'm not because I find optimizing your MP3 encoder for various situations can save you a whole heap of space and a whole heap of trouble whilst not compremising on good audio quality. Further to this when you select one of the VBR modes offered, which VBR method will the encoder use, the "old" or the "new" method? The "new" method is indeed faster but the "old" method (whilst slower) is of a far better quality and there are other VBR settings which should be available which don't seem to be, 2 quality settings for example whereas Easy CD DA Extractor only allows the access to one. Now to the "Format Conversion" section, again very nicely laid out but one annoyance here and perhaps this will be fixed in later versions. One would think for instance that if you had say a Wave and Cue pair of files (as generated by many rippers including EAC, Max Ripper and even Easy CD DA Extractor itself), you should therefore be able to open the cue file which would therefore in tern open the associated Wave file and you should be able to convert the content to MP3 tracks or whatever, not so it seems which is a crying shame. So there you have it, some of my thoughts on Easy CD DA Extractor but its still worth supporting at $49.00.
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