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MPC Tutorial
Lossless Tutorial

• High quality backups can only be made from an original, commercial, pressed CD - not from a CD-r or DAT or any other media type.
• Extraction logs included (i.e. EAC logfiles of extractions of all tracks, or Plextools, CDparanoia logs, in case you are using Linux)
• EAC Secure Mode (or a secure Plextool mode/settings or certain secure Linux/CDparanoia script/settings, this guide will be extended in future...)
• No use of C2 – uncheck both boxes in EAC. Other drive features correctly set.
• 'Test & Copy selected tracks', no errors & both CRCs match (10th column!)
• If you do a gap detection, gaps must be appended to previous track (default) !! More info on Cue types & Gap manipulation can be found (here) and (here)
• No normalizing - to confirm this go to EAC > EAC Options > Normalize. All numbers are greyed out, nothing checked .
• No specific Filename scheme is necessary, but a track number must be included to preserve track order. You should review the recommendations.
• MPC --quality 7 --xlevel (or better, read here), or Lossless like FLAC, Monkey's Ape, Optimfrog (& O. DualStream) or WavePack (& W. Hybrid)
• Complete Tag : APE2 tags for mpc & lossless formats, FLAC: native tag
• MD5 'lock': your original .MD5 file should be stored in a secure location to allow future file verification.
• Replaygain performed for album mode. If you include the replaygain-log for mpc, then rename preferrably to the album name, e.g. 'album-replaygain.txt'.
• Encoder versions:
  Lossless : use latest stable encoders, e.g. flac 1.1.1 or WavPack 4.1
  MPC : use the latest beta (stable) encoder, currently v1.14 (if you wish to use a different version, please read here.

The rest is up to you. Of course you may exceed these listed specifications. The recommended naming scheme has the advantage good organization on your drive. The purpose of this guide is to achieve transparent & perfect Archive Quality while still retaining flexibility and simplicity. Kick out the Jams !!