EAC to FLAC encoding

Since the new hard drive setup seems to be working, I'm starting the project of ripping my CDs. I've decided to use Exact Audio Copy to rip and FLAC to encode. I set EAC for secure mode with "normal" error recovery. Grabbing a random CD, here's what I got:

• CD: Gregorianischer Choral - Death & Resurrection (1982)
• Length: 1hr, 15min
• Size: 750MB
• Compressed: 303MB
• Time Elapsed: 22min

This is with a disc that had no errors. This is extraordinarily slow, and it will take over 360 hours to rip 1000 cds.... Unfortunately, I don't see a way to make things significantly faster without risking corruption; I'm getting approximately 4x speed, and the EAC website says this is normal for secure mode, "because in secure mode EAC reads every sector at least twice". Perhaps the only way to help things is to install a second drive into the system and rip two discs at once.

Incidentally, it's a shame that a high-quality tool like EAC is so difficult to configure. I imagine that the reason it's difficult is because it is so powerful. In any case, I'll post these configurations in the hopes that they can make someone's life easier.

To configure EAC to work with FLAC: from the menu, select EAC → Compression options → External Compression. Check "Use external program for compression" and select "User Defined Encoder" for the parameter passing scheme. In the program path, find "flac.exe". Under "Additional Command Line Options", enter:

-T "artist=%a" -T "title=%t" -T "album=%g" -T "date=%y" -T "tracknumber=%n" -T "genre=%m" %s

To configure EAC's filenaming scheme: from the menu, select EAC → EAC Options → Filename. I use an "Artist\Year - Album\Track Number - Track Name.flac" scheme. To configure this, in the "Naming scheme", I use:

%A\%Y - %C\%N - %T

I also check the "Use various artist naming scheme", and there I input:

Various Artists\%Y - %C\%N - %T