Exact Audio Copy allows you to get audio tracks off a CD and save them to your hard drive. It uses the Windows ASPI Interface, so both SCSI and ATAPI CD-ROM drives are supported.

It supports hidden sector synchronization and has a secure, fast and burst extraction method selectable. Fast extraction should get the same speed as other grabbers, but is probably not exact anymore. Burst mode just grabs the audio data without any synchronization.

It allows you to output of time positions of all non-exact corrections and listen to these positions. You can also copy of ranges of music data, not only tracks. Automatic Speed reduction on errors and fallback afterwards ensures that your music will still sound decent. It uses the Windows Audio Compression Manager for direct compression to MP3 or WAV.

It also supports external MP3, VQF, RA and AAC encoders for automatic compression after extraction. Filename editing is easy with local and remote CDDB database and CDPLAYER.INI support and more features like ID3 tagging.

Exact Audio Copy also uses LAME enconding engine. If you do not have LAME already installed, download it here.