Exact Audio Copy

Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is a proprietary CD ripping program for Microsoft Windows. It has also been tested to work under newer versions of Wine on Linux. This program was created by Andre Wiethoff in 1998, while he was a student at the University of Dortmund in Germany, stating he became "fed up with other audio grabbers", and decided to develop his own.

If there are any errors that can't be corrected, the software tells the user which time position the (possible) distortion occurred, so they could easily control it with, for example, the media player.

EAC is used to convert the tracks on standard audio CDs to WAV files, which can then be transcoded into other formats. These include lossy ones such as MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, or lossless ones such as ALAC, FLAC, or WavPack using external encoders. It also has the option of using the Windows Audio Compression Manager (ACM Codecs) for direct compression. It supports AccurateRip (automatically comparing the copy with those rips made by others) and can automatically create Cue Sheets, with all gaps, track attributes, ISRC, and CD-Text included. EAC also supports automatic ID3 tagging using Internet-based databases such as freedb, GD3 (see below), or a local database.

With the release of 1.0b1, EAC supported the downloading of CD cover art, and in b2, an option was added to have the ID3 information, such as artist, CD title, track names, and cover art downloaded automatically from the GD3 database. The GD3 option allowed a user who set up an account to make 10 free initial queries, but afterwards, required them to pay a one-time fee of $7.99, after which they were allowed to make an unlimited number of queries.

Exact Audio Copy is freeware, free for non-commercial use, and highly popular among audiophiles for its high accuracy and ability to rip severely damaged audio compact discs.