Gone are the days when everyone had a huge collection of audio CDs. Now we buy music digitally from apps like Spotify. There is no need to fill up your shelves with hundreds of audio CDs, everything is ready for your listening pleasure from your Spotify account. But if you have already inherited the audio CD collection of your grandfather then you may want to convert them into digital format for storing on your hard drive so that you can quickly listen to the audio tracks without having to shuffle through all the CDs and their covers.
For making a backup of audio CDs, you can use Exact Audio Copy. It is freeware and claims to make a perfect copy of your audio CDs without any errors. It can work with all types of physical CD/DVD drives including internal optical drives and external optical drives using any connection type such as USB, SATA, Firewire or SCSI. It can extract the raw data from your audio CDs as well as compress the audio tracks into many popular formats such as MP3, OGG Vorbis, WAV, FLAC, WMA etc.
As soon as you insert the audio CD in your CD/DVD drive, it automatically detects the CD and displays information about it. It can auto-identify the silence gaps between the tracks and creates different audio files based on the gap information. It can identify the audio CD and can display its album cover downloaded from the internet. It comes with a sound editor for editing extracted WAV format tracks using which you can remove noise, correct the volume, and apply many different types of filters.
Exact Audio Copy is free and makes identical copies of your audio CDs. It can extract data even from the CDs that might be damaged a little, for example, if they are scratched. It is an ideal tool for extracting audio tracks from your old audio CD collection.
You can download Exact Audio Copy from http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/.