R.i.p. Eac!

Wow but what EAC (exactaudiocopy dot org, was (and may still be?) an excellent free CD ripper) now has MAJOR amounts of bloatware in it!!

I picked a wrong cancel option near the end of the confusing install process (confusing because it repeatedly tries to install bloatware, and the challenge for you is to not get sucked into letting it load the bloatware).

From the closed thread http://forum.notebookreview.com/windows-os-software/567558-flac-ripper-player.html I found two alternatives that I'll pursue:

1. fre:ac - free audio converter

2. CDex | Free Audio & Video software downloads at SourceForge.net

 

I found that fre:ac v1.0.20a works adequately on my Win7 X220 laptop.

 

I'm a big fan of fre:ac - high-quality, fast audio ripping and converting, and it's all free. I used to regularly download crappy shareware programs that only did one or two kinds of conversions when I needed to convert from one format to another, but now all I need is fre:ac.

 

Thanks for the feedback.

I did mis-title this thread as EAC hasn't died, it simply now has an install process that is very convoluted.

I do happen to have install of EAC without the bloatware; just have to get that desktop back in action.

The only thing I'm not sure about with fre:ac is that it doesn't provide any hint of whether the CD is of marginal quality. But I've so far only used fre:ac to rip one CD so I'm unsure about making a judgement like that of fre:ac at this point.