Perfect AAC Rips with EAC and iTunes

Itunes Eac

With iTunesEncode you can rip CDs with EAC and automatically have them passed over to iTunes to compress to AAC. Why do this? EAC (Exact Audio Copy) is the best CD ripper available. It can read through just about any error. There are plugins that can be had for EAC to compress to AAC, but they are not anywhere near the quality of the iTunes AAC encoder. This way you just click a button in EAC, and your tracks will show up in iTunes appropriately tagged. No extra steps for you. Read on to see how to set this up.

Step 1:

Download and setup EAC. Click here for help.

Step 2:

Make sure iTunes is installed.

Step 3:

Click here to download iTunesEncode. Credit to Otto42 for creating this.

Step 4:

Extract itunesencode46.zip to your EAC directory. It will be something like “C:Program FilesExact Audio Copy.”

Step 5:

Setup iTunesEncode in EAC. Click Compression Options.
Eac1

Check Use external program for compression.
Eac2

Select User Defined Encoder from the drop-down box and then type “.m4a” into the file extension box. Then hit Browse.
Eac3

Locate the file iTunesEncode.exe.
Eac4

For Additional command-line options enter:

-e "AAC Encoder" -a "%a" -l "%g" -t "%t" -g "%m" -y %y -n %n -i %s -o %d

Make sure that everything looks the same as below. Don’t worry about the bit rate. It encodes with whatever you have set in iTunes.
Eac5

That’s it. Clicking MP3 button will now rip tracks. One thing I noticed: don’t mess around with settings or track info in iTunes while ripping. It causes this to screw up. If you are just playing music then there will not be any problems.