This is the content of the EAC homepage at http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/



                           Exact Audio Copy


Introduction

Exact Audio Copy is a so called audio grabber for audio CDs using standard 
CD and DVD-ROM drives. The main differences between EAC and most other 
audio grabbers are :

    * It is free (for non-commercial purposes)
    * It works with a technology, which reads audio CDs almost perfectly. 
      If there are any errors that can’t be corrected, it will tell you 
      on which time position the (possible) distortion occurred, so you 
      could easily control it with e.g. the media player

With other audio grabbers you usually need to listen to every grabbed wave 
because they only do jitter correction. Scratched CDs read on CD-ROM drives 
often produce distortions. But listening to every extracted audio track is 
a waste of time. Exact Audio Copy conquer these problems by making use of 
several technologies like multi-reading with verify and AccurateRip. 



Features of EAC

    * All kinds of CD and DVD drives are supported (including USB, Firewire, 
      SATA and SCSI drives)
    * Hidden sector synchronization (jitter correction)
    * A secure, a fast and a burst extraction methods selectable. Fast 
      extraction should run at the same speed as other grabbers with jitter 
      correction, but is probably not exact anymore. Burst mode just grabs 
      the audio data without any synchronization.
    * Detection of read errors and complete losses of sync and correction 
      in the secure mode, as far as possible
    * Output of time positions of all non-exact corrections and the 
      possibility to listen to these positions
    * EAC is able to copy ranges of music data, not only tracks
    * Automatic speed reduction on read errors and fallback to a higher
      speed afterwards (depends on the used drive)
    * Volume normalization of extracted audio to a given percentage
    * Usage of the Windows Audio Compression manager (ACM Codecs) for direct
      compression to e.g. MP3 waves
    * Support for the LAME DLL that is usable like an ACM Codec for on-the-fly
      MP3 compression
    * Support of external MP3, WMA, flac and OggVorbis encoders for automatic
      compression after extraction (supports multi-processor environments)
    * Batch compression to WAV files and decompression of supported encoded 
      files to WAV
    * Compression offset support for exact compression/decompression
    * Detection of pre-track gaps (positions where negative track times runs 
      towards 00:00:00)
    * Detection of silence in pre-track gaps
    * Automatic creation of CUE sheets for Burnnn, Feurio, Nero or even EAC, 
      which can include all gaps, indicies, track attributes, UPC and ISRC 
      and also CD-Text for an exact copy
    * CD player functionality and prelistening to selected ranges
    * Automatic detection of drive features, whether a drive has an accurate 
      stream and/or does caching
    * Sample offsets for drives with noaccurate streams, including the option 
      of filling up missing samples with silence
    * Synchronizing between tracks for non-accurate stream drives
    * Trackname editing with local/remote CD databases support and more 
      features like ID3 tagging
    * Browse and edit local database
    * Certified Escient ® CDDB(TM)Compatible
    * Local CDDB support
    * Record and loop record functions for recording from LP, radio, etc.
    * Automatic renaming of MP3 files accordingto their ID3 tag
    * Catalog extraction function (e.g. first 20 seconds of a track)
    * Multisession (CD-Extra) support
    * CD-Text support
    * CD-Write support for some drives (internally and using CDRDAO)
    * ID3 V1.1 tag editor with drag and drop ability from track listing and 
      CD database browser
    * Glitch removal after extraction
    * Small WAV editor with the following functionality: delete, trim, 
      normalize, pad, glitch removal, pop detection, interpolation of ranges, 
      noise reduction, fade in/out, undo (and much more)
    * Program is free for personal use, so feel free to copy



Extraction Technology

In secure mode this program either reads every audio sector at least twice 
or rely on extended error information that some drives are able to return 
with the audio data. That is one reason why the program is slower than other 
rippers. But by using this technique non-identical sectors are detected. 
If an error occurs (read or sync error), the program keeps on reading this 
sector, until eight of 16 retries are identical, but at maximum one, three 
or five times (according to the selected error recovery quality) these 
16 retries are read. So, in the worst case, bad sectors are read up to 
82 times! But this effort will help the program to obtain the best result 
by comparing all of the retries.
If it is not sure that the audio stream is correct (at least that it can 
not be said at approx. 99.5%) the program will tell the user where the 
(possible) read error occurred. The program also tries to correct the 
jitter artefacts that occur on the first block of a track, so that each 
extraction should be exactly the same. On drives which have the 
“accurate stream” feature, this is guaranteed. Of course, this technology 
is a little bit more complex, especially with some CD drives which 
implements caching. When drives cache audio data, every sector read will 
be read from the drives cache and is that way always identical. Basically 
there are several ways to clear the cache. In newer versions it will 
overread sectors, so that the cache contains sectors from a position 
elsewhere on the CD.
EAC has several secure read modes, depending on the features of the drive. 
One really fast mode (nearly burst mode speed) is for drives with C2 error 
pointer support, accurate stream and are non-caching. Another mode (up to 
half of maximum speed) is for non-caching, accurate stream drives (without 
C2 support). If caching need to be defeated, the secure mode will be much 
slower, when no read errors occur it will usually something around a third 
to a fourth of the drives maximum speed.
This program is really quite slow in secure mode in comparison with other 
grabbers, but the program checks every sector over and over to get the 
correct data with high certainty. If you don’t like this feature of EAC 
and prefer fast copies instead of secure copies, you are able to use the 
fast or burst extraction option in the drive options menu. But of course 
in fast mode, the program will no longer be able to find read errors. 
Only if a read error occurs in a sector synchronization area, a sync error 
will be displayed. Fast mode is sector synchronized with 2 synchronization 
blocks of 23 total blocks. Burst copy is even worse, no synchronization is 
performed at all, enabling extraction at maximum speed of the drive. No 
error checking of any kind is done. For burst mode there is at least a 
small indicator of the extracted track quality. If the stream ever breaks, 
it will tell the user in the status report by showing up suspicous positions.
Of course this is only an heuristic; there needn’t be any errors on these 
positions; moreover there could be errors that are not found at all.



AccurateRip

EAC supports the AccurateRip plugin, which is included in the setup in the 
newer versions. If you don’t know what this is or want to download this DLL, 
please visit http://www.AccurateRip.com.
In order to install the plugin into EAC, you need to drop the AccurateRip.dll
in the EAC directory (or in a Windows search path for DLLs). EAC should then 
recognize the plugin automatically. You can easily find out whether EAC has 
been loaded AccurateRip as the AccurateRip menu entry in EACs “Database” menu 
will be enabled. Additionally EAC will reserve a squared area for a symbol at 
the bottom right corner (besides the playback control).
In order to setup AccurateRip, you usually need some CDs for calibrating the 
drives, you can read more on that on the AccurateRip homepage. This has to be 
done only once, afterwards the drive will stay configured. Basically, if you 
insert a CD that can be used to configure AccurateRip, a dialog pops up and 
guides you through the setup process. Once a drive is configured, it will 
automatically use the determined offset and ask the AccurateRip database for 
result comparison after extracting a CD. Further, on each rip some offset and 
checksum data is generated, which can be send to the AccurateRip database 
using the AccurateRip menu interface in EAC. This helps to insert more CDs 
for the initial calibration and for checksum comparison into the AccurateRip 
database. Right now there are plenty of CDs in the calibration database, 
most of the charts and pop/rock classics could be used to configure the 
drive.
If a CD is contained in the AccurateRip checksum database, EAC will show an 
AccurateRip logo in the bottom-right corner of the main window. If that 
happens, EAC will show after ripping some AccurateRip information in the 
status dialog. It shows tracks checksums that are extracted from EAC and 
from the database. Depending on the confidence, you can rely that the track 
was ripped correct (or not correct). For more information, please have a 
look on the AccurateRip homepage.
If you have problems making EAC to run, please check these points :

    * AccurateRip works tracks-based (so the whole track need to be extracted 
      in order to be checked against the internet database)
    * If the option “Remove leading and trailing silence” is disabled, 
      most probably not the full track is extracted and can not be checked 
      against the AccurateRip database
    * Better activate “Fill missing samples with silence”, as then the track 
      has the correct length, this does not harm if overreading is activated

At the moment, the AccurateRip database is already quite populated, but of 
course you should help to populate it further. After installation and 
configuration, EAC will automatically create checksum data for the database, 
which can be transmitted via EACs AccurateRip menu entry.
AccurateRip will simplify and support exact extraction even more than simply 
using secure mode!



Gap Technology

EAC is able to to detect pre-track gaps. These are the pauses between two 
tracks. Usually they are two seconds long and a CD player will display 
negative timings during this pause. By using the command 
“Detect Pre-Track Gaps” it is possible to detect all gap-lengths by 
reading the sub-channel information. As this information is not stored 
on the CD directly, EAC has to search for the position where a track ends. 
This search is usually quite fast, but it still will take on average a 
second per track.
You can choose to add the gaps to the previous track (which is how other 
rippers will usually extract tracks). Otherwise you can choose either to 
append the gap to the correct track or to leave it out. A benefit of 
performing the detection and getting the gap times is the possibility 
to copy a range. That way the correct times will be displayed in the 
copy range dialog.
Please note: Because the pre-track gaps are determined by looking up CD 
positions, it is possible that it will not be 100% accurate. But in most 
cases it will be correct, the deviance should be lower than 2-3 sectors.



Automatic Feature Detection Technology

EAC is able to autodetect the drive features. For each drive the program 
builds a separate drive options page. On this option page the feature 
autodetection function can be evoked.
There are three different features that will be checked by EAC: Firstly 
whether the stream is accurate, secondly whether the drive caches audio 
data and finally whether the drive supports C2 error pointers.
Even if the drive has a cache (from the drive specifications), it does not 
necessarily mean that the drive will use the cache on audio extractions.
The test for the accurate stream feature should be always correct, but 
testing for caching will give some problems with drives that extract 
audio very slowly (below 4x speed). If the test results are uncertain 
(e.g. on different tests there are two different results), you should 
assume that the drive does caching. If testing for accurate stream only 
sometimes gives a negative result, then you could nevertheless try to use 
the accurate secure mode.
Having a drive that does cache audio, the appropriate option in the drive 
options need to be set. This has the consequence that the drive need to 
flush the cache between read operations. This will take time and slow 
down the extraction quite much. If you select a drive for extraction 
better have a look that the drive does not cache audio data.
The drive configuration wizard has also a build-in drive database which 
can identify a drives features by the drives name. This should work for 
all drives which are sold already quite some time. On drive feature 
autodetection you are able send the results to the EAC database in order 
to be included in future versions.



Track Synchronization Technology

Usually CD audio extraction programs will extract one track after another 
independently . This could cause some problems on CD-ROM drives which have 
no accurate stream, when using a CD which has no silent areas between songs. 
When this option is enabled in the EAC options, EAC will synchronize a track 
with a preceeding track in case that there is no silence at the track 
junction, so track transitions will be free from jitter artifacts 
(e.g. on live recordings).



Offset Technology

“Sample Offset” is another new feature of EAC, it will help to always get 
the same WAVs compared to a different reader drive and to prevent generation 
losses that way. Nearly all drives are not able to position their head 
correctly. That means if the program tells the drive to read block 10000 
it will perhaps read data somewhere in block 9998 instead. But this is not 
obvious to the reading program, it will not know if it does really received 
the data it wanted. Usually the head will be set always to a fixed offset 
before or after the correct read position. So it is possible to detect this 
offset once and use it for all CDs coming afterwards. 
Because it is very difficult to determine the absolute exact offset for each 
drive, I determined a very probably offset once on my Plextor 14/32. As 
different designs of CD-R writers usually do not add the same offset on 
writing, it seems that also big CD manufactures also do not always press the 
same offset on their CDs. The most common offset of pressed CDs is integrated 
into the offset detection routines.
To find out the offset of any other drive, the offset is calculated relative 
to that absolute offset. To implement an offset detection for any other drive, 
EAC has an included database with some CDs where the offset is known. These 
are the reference each CD-ROM drive is compared with. Of course EAC does 
only include a very limited selection of CDs that can be used to detect this 
offset, a list can be found in the next menu point. Sometimes there are 
different versions (releases) of the same CD, but only the same press like 
the one used for creating the database, the detection of the offset will 
work. That is why the table shows a code, that is written on the inner ring 
of the music CD, that should identify the release of a CD. The red codes are 
from CDs which do not work with this test.
Drives that have jitter are unable to position their heads correctly. So you 
should activate the secure or fast extraction method and moreover if your 
drive does caching, activate the cache flushing. The “Searching Track Start” 
algorithm tries to find the correct start position even if jitter occurs. 
But this is not always possible, mainly if the drive jitters too much.
YOU SHOULD USE THIS TEST ON TWO DIFFERENT CDS AT LEAST! BOTH TESTS SHOULD 
GIVE BACK THE SAME VALUE!
The Plextor 14/32 has an offset value of +679 samples, which means that 
679 samples usually are missing at the end of a WAV file.
AccurateRip can also be used to determine the drives offset, this is exactly 
the same offset as detected by EAC. But AccurateRips database is much larger 
than EACs, so just let AccurateRip detect your offset with one or more audio 
CDs which it recognize as offset reference.
Please help to measure more reference CDs. Just send the AccurateRip result 
after extracting some discs to the AccurateRip database using the menu 
within EAC.



Sound Editor

EAC also includes a small wave editor that has some neat functions that 
could be very handy when handling extracted audio files. As a restriction 
only CD-compliant uncompressed, 16 bit, 44.1 kHz stereo samples files can 
be used. Following are more details for some of the functions of the 
wave editor.



Glitch Removal

In the wave editor - and also on listening error positions after extraction - 
it is possible to remove glitches from wave files. But this will work only 
on uncompressed files in both cases.
But what are glitches? Glitches are single samples that are completely out 
of the wave stream. Best to see on the following pictures, which is really 
an extreme example that probably won’t occur with EACs secure extraction.
Only these glitches are removed, all other samples will be preserved without 
any changes. When playing a wave file with glitches it will usually issue 
high frequent ‘ticks’. Linear interpolation is used in this case for 
removal of these glitches. Pops and other artifacts are burried deeper in 
the sample structure and can be removed using different functions. 
Glitches are created digitally, some single sample values are just wrong, 
all surrounding samples are most often fine.
The well-known pops on the other hand occur mainly when having lost sync 
between audio blocks, where two parts of a wavefile are joined (and in case 
these parts do not fit together correctly). This does happen also on LP 
recordings where the head rumble over the groove. But regarding pop detection 
and removal, please have a look at the other chapters.



Interpolation

Interpolation will try to find a replacement of the waveform for small 
duration of audio. The waveform of the selected range will be interpolated 
from the audio samples left and right to the selected area. Afterwards 
usually any pops or other artefacts should be removed and not be audible 
anymore.
The selected range has to be pretty small, otherwise the menu entry will 
be disabled. Usually only very small parts should be replaced anyway, as 
it will get audible if there is a tone changing by interpolation. Around 
0.1 seconds should be maximum for interpolation.
Make sure that there are no errors left or right of the replacement region 
or new errors will be inserted into the result. This function is often used 
to remove detected pops.
On the other hand linear Interpolation will create a linear connection 
between the points of the wave in the selected range. This should only 
be used for very very small ranges, as it doesn’t produce correct sounding 
replacements, but it could be used to connect a jump in the waveform 
more gently. Just try it out, if it doesn’t bring the expected results, 
you are able to un-do the operation and do something different or user 
other parameters for the functions.



Automatic Detection Of Pops

This function tries to find pops in a selected range automatically. 
This operation is slow, so you shouldn’t select the complete file, but 
a smaller area in which you already have verified that there are pops in 
there. Depending on the parameters, it will find some pops where none 
exist, and it may also fail to find some other real existant pops.
After EAC ends the search it will display a dialog with all of the found 
positions. With a double-click on such a position, it will select the 
probably defective range. The dialog doesn’t need to be closed, it can be 
kept open during work on such a defective position (e.g. by interpolation). 
Afterwards just go to the next pop by clicking on a different error position.
  
  

Noise Reduction

Most real-world recordings using a microphone will have more or less 
broadband noise in the audio file. It is usually extremly difficult to 
remove the noise without creating artefacts within the music. EAC is 
capable of reducing noise with great effeciency, even creating better 
sounding results than some commercial applications.
To reduce noise from a wave file it is necessary to start with a noise 
profile. This could either be loaded from disk (saved from a previous 
session) or created from a selected range in the audio. This range for 
profile generation should be at least something around half a second. 
The range used for the creation of the profile should consist of pure 
noise, no other sound or music should be found in the selected range. 
This is important as otherwise the noise reduction will filter some 
frequency bands which contain a wanted signal.
After having created or loaded a noise profile you can use it on ranges 
of any size (usually the complete file) to reduce the detected kind 
of noise. You can select a reduction level for the noise, 6 dB will 
half the volume of the noise, 12 dB will already quarter the noise level. 
When setting a too high level, the wanted signal can get distorted, 
so be cautious with that setting. Sometimes it can be better to do 
the lighter filter twice instead of doing a hard filter.
You can also store a file of the remnants of the filtering. This should 
contain only the noise and nothing of the wanted signal ideally. Of 
course this is not always possible, but try to reduce the signal in the 
noise file as much as possible. EAC will write this file to harddisc, you 
can play it back using a media player, or open it also in a wave editor.
  


Spectral Display

If the spectral mode is selected in the menu, it takes some seconds to 
calculate a frequency spectrum for the displayed range. The Y axis will 
be used for different frequencies, at the bottom the low frequencies are 
displayed and at the top the high frequencies (up to 22.5 kHz which is 
the maximum frequency you can archive with a 44.1 kHz sample rate). 
Further the color of a point describe the amplitude of each frequency band. 
If there are discontinuties in this view, there is sometimes something 
wrong in the wave.
This kind of display has some advantages. E.g. pops are much more easily 
found, as an example see the next picture.
In this example have a look at the mid of the shown range. There are some 
red spikes which show a distortion in the audio for a very short period 
of time. Before and afterwards sound is all quite the same, only that single 
position stands out. It is more than probable that this defect is audible. 
Play that range and listen carefully to determine how bad it really is.
The yellow selected range is a special selection mode on the spectral 
display. In sample selection mode, only one sample is selected, but in 
spectral display this one sample has effects to quite a range of the 
spectral display. This is why the selection cursor is at least a specific 
size. If you learned how to use it correctly, it can be of great help 
finding these positions in the sample display.



Smooth Samples

This function will smooth the undulation a sound wave. This is usefull for 
LP recordings or other pops/clicks. The amplitude is smoothed, which means 
that high frequent parts are filtered out. So basically this function will 
perform a kind of low-pass filtering. It won’t cut-off frequencies above a 
special limit, but it will lower the volume according to its frequency. The 
higher the frequency, the more it get filtered.
This function can also be of help in removing pops and clicks. Just call 
this function as often as needed for the same range, but better keep the 
used range as small as possible.
  
  
  
Tips & Tricks

    * Better use AccurateRip for offset detection and an additional 
      verification of the secure rips, read more on this in Basic 
      Technology - AccurateRip.
    * In the audio editor keep the right mouse button pressed and select 
      a range on the time bar or on the sample value bar in order to zoom 
      a range on the time or sample value bar.
      Also keep the left mouse button pressed in order to move the time 
      bar or the sample bar in each direction.
      A double click on the right mouse button will zoom out the specific bar.
    * Some drives have problems reading extended TOC informations from CDs. 
      There are two command line options to help on problems when starting 
      EAC or inserting a CD. You could use
          o nocdtext
          o nomultisession
      It is possible to combine any of the command line options.
      EAC will crash on some systems. Therefore I implemented some command 
      line options that will disable some functions that could crash the 
      system. The options are
          o nostopcommand
          o notestunit
          o nospeedsel
          o noreadsub
      e.g. EAC -noreadsub -notestunit
      You should have CDs already inserted in ALL your drives when starting 
      EAC. On some systems it will still crash if no CD is present when 
      EAC is running.
      Furthermore, you might want to try to disable the flag ‘DMA Transfer’ 
      from system properties, hardware manager for each CD-ROM drive in the 
      system (which will make extractions much more slower though).
    * Many guides regarding the setup and use of EAC can be found on the 
      Links section of this page
    * Some older CD-ROM drives will perform better on DAE when updating 
      the firmware.
    * The WAV comparison feature could also be used to determine a combined 
      reader/writer offset for exact audio duplication. This offset can then 
      be used for each pair of reader/writer.
      To determine the offset, you need an already copied audio CD where the 
      WAV files were extracted with 0 offset.
      Now extract the same range (somewhere in the middle of a track) with 
      your prefered audio drive of the original and the copied CD.
      When extracted both files call compare WAV files and have a look at 
      the number of the first missing/extraneous samples. This number will 
      be the combined reader/writer offset. To determine whether the number 
      should be positive or negative, you have to look if the samples are 
      missing or are extraneous. If the original wav file has extraneous 
      samples at the beginning, the offset should be negative otherwise 
      positive (if the file of the copied CD has extraneous samples the 
      offset should otherwise be positive, etc.)
      To check the correct offset, you could enter the offset value in the 
      options and extract again the same range from the copied CD and 
      compare it again with the range of the original CD, both should then 
      be the same…
    * With the WAV editor it is also possible to compare the actual file with 
      another WAV file on the hard disk. This has the advantage that the 
      differing positions could automatically be selected by double-clicking 
      the position in the list box. This will make correction of badly read 
      tracks very easy.
    * On some systems EAC will not find a matching read mode. In that case 
      select the correct read command in the drive options menu manually. 
      If your drive seem to make a bus reset (blinking LEDs for some seconds) 
      or still does not find a matching read mode, please send an email!
    * If a CD has songs from various artists, you could select the option 
      “Various Artists” on the main screen. This will enable splitted track 
      names. The first part of each track name is the artist name and the 
      second part is the song title. Both parts are separated by the 
      character “/”. For example: Metallica / Nothing Else Matters
    * freedb servers require an email address in the freedb options, you 
      can also enter this information in the configuration wizard. If a 
      server times out or does not respond, you can select another CDDB 
      server from the list supplied in the list box. From time to time 
      you should update the server list by pressing the button below 
      that list box.
    * If your computer doesn’t show any drives or shows an access violation 
      after starting EAC, it is often the ASPI interface. There are many ASPI 
      versions available which will work (more or less reliably) with EAC. 
      Changing the interface setting could also help. To install a new ASPI, 
      you should choose one from Nero® which can be download for free 
      from Ahead®.
      If this still does not help, also try the Native SCSI setting in the 
      interface options.
    * You can open two instances of EAC, enabling you to read audio data from 
      two different CD-ROM drives simultaneously. But make sure that you start 
      both instances from different directories, otherwise some unanticipated 
      side-effects could occur.
    * To exactly position the sliders in selecting a range to copy, you could 
      move the sliders secondswise by clicking left or right side of the 
      sliders (same as pressing the <page up> and <page down> keys) and 
      blockwise by pressing the <cursor left> and <cursor right> keys.
    * If your drive caches audio data, you have to use the appropriate 
      extraction mode, or if you still use the old secure mode, you have to 
      enable the option ‘disable CD-ROM drive cache’. If not, the result 
      will be the same as using “Fast Extraction” (having no error detection).



Documentation

This is only a pre-release, so no work on the user documentation has been 
done yet. A complete user guide and documentation will be done as soon as 
I find some time. At least video tutorials for the first steps in EAC and 
for the audio editor are planned.
If you encounter any bugs, please report them by mail or email. But when 
reporting, please don’t forget these important information:

    * Operating system
    * Hardware configuration (CPU, memory, CD-ROM drive, etc.)
    * All events on extraction, drive features
    * Bugs that have occurred

Please do not send simple questions like “How could I save my wave file 
with 22.050 Hz, 8 bit, mono ?”. Only reports and questions that might be 
interesting for the development of EAC will be answered. If you need 
other support, please subscribe to the mailing list or post a question 
in the forum.
  


Registration

This program is free for private use! This means, using the program will cost 
you no money, as long as you only use it for non-commercial purposes. No 
registration is necessary in this case, just use the version from the download 
page, it is already the full version.
But I would greatly appreciate any donations made by you voluntarily to help 
me improving EAC by using the donations for compiler updates etc. Please note 
that cashing a check is very expensive (around US-$ 7) and so please don’t 
send checks if you want to donate anything, many thanks!
I have now subscribed to PayPal, below is a donate button if you want to send 
something from your PayPal account or want to use your credit card. Many 
thanks for all your support!
It is also possible to send me something from my Amazon Wishlist. The site 
is Amazon Germany, but it should be quite easy to understand the major 
buttons as the layout is the same worldwide.
Please tell me what you like (or dislike) by sending me an email.
Please Note : I will no longer answer such emails or support requests. There 
are far too many of them in order to answer all of them. Please use the 
mailing list or the forum instead! Sorry for the inconvenience!



Legal Limitations

The full license agreement text is shown on installing or can be found in the 
Legal.rtf file that resides in the EAC directory.
You are free to copy the program for private purposes, but it is 
not allowed to

    * Make changes to the executable and distribute it
    * Disassemble or decompile the executable
    * Spread it together with other programs on CD-ROM, web sites or any 
      other media without my permission. It is allowed to put it up on free 
      FTP sites or make links directly to my homepage. Of course you can pass 
      a copy of it to your family and friends.

For commercial use a special license is needed, please contact me for details. 
It is commercial use when any result of EAC (of the extraction engine, wave 
editor, writing engine, etc.) is used for any commercial purpose.