For a long time I was in the dark about copying disks to my HD with minimal audio and quality loss. But after discovering EAC, FLAC Frontend and Foobar, I started searching for an answer. And this time, I found it.

Firstly, get EAC. It may not be the most user friendly thing ever, but it does the job well. Once you've got it going, stick an audio CD into your drive and tap F10. If the tab is not already open, go to the 'Extraction Method' tab and select 'Detect Read Features'. This will check over your drive's specs and configure the program to deal with it optimally. This should take about 3 - 4 mins, after that just click on 'OK'. When the next screen comes up select 'Secure Mode' and do the following:

• If EAC has said that your drive supports caching, it is probable that all EAC will read will be a cache of the data on your disc. This boosts the likelihood of errors and generally (although not always) causes a noticeable read speed decrease. Having this option ticked means that EAC will override the cache, which is generally better.
• If EAC says you have an accurate stream, this is good, so tick this option. The clue is in the name.
• If EAC says your drive handles C2 error info, EAC is dependent solely on your drive's own C2 accuracy, which varies wildly from drive to drive. This (generally) increases the probability of getting errors in the read process. I'd suggest you disable it.
• Now that all that is done, click OK. Now we move on to the rip process (referred to by EAC as 'extraction'). Either retrieve the CD information from your CD cover (which is slow, but obviously accurate) or get it from freeDB. freeDB is reasonably accurate, but the users submitting often seem to be drunk at the time of entering the CDs into the database (kidding, kidding!), and a lot of track titles are misspelt. If this is so, just edit the CD info manually after freeDB gets the data off of its database. Now it is time to rip, so press Alt+F7; in there input your desired filename and save location. The file produced will be big, but you won't need it permanently.

Now grab foobar2000, and during installation make sure to manually select every item which can be installed. A lot of the goodness of foobar is not installed when you set the installer to setup automatically. Once it is open, drag the cuesheet into foobar (if you would rather just keep it as a one-file image, drag the WAV), then select 'Convert', and then 'Convert To'. Change the encoding preset to 'FLAC, level 5', and click the button with the triple dots. Drag the slider to the right for a more accurate conversion, and then click 'OK'; followed by 'OK' again on the next screen. Then, depending on your setup, it may ask you for 'flac.exe'. If you don't have this, don't worry, it can be downloaded from here. Download the latest file called 'flac[version].exe', and once downloaded rename it to 'flac.exe'. If you do not usually see the extension at the end of the filename, just type 'flac' and hit the return key. Now, go back to foobar and tell it where you put that file - then click OK. It will then ask you where you want to export your files. Select wherever you would like, and your files will begin exporting.

Or you could just download FLAC frontend from the link above and use that to convert to lossless audio.

Not a great idea. The FLAC frontend often causes copy errors - I have seen this on multiple computers with multiple people, and this was indeed on the latest version. Not sure what the problem is, but it appears the frontend doesn't like EAC.

When I rip audio cd's to FLAC (or even mp3's) I use dBpoweramp, It does a excellent job as well.

dBpoweramp: CD Ripper & Audio Converter. Secure ripping to mp3, FLAC, m4a, Apple Lossless & WMA

I have used the latest version of EAC , but it does not recognize my new Samsung TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S203D dvd burners. So that programme has been uninstalled as wortheless to me...

EAC is really for the hardcore audio junkies, but then again on a similar level so is FLAC... dBPA will do a good job, but EAC goes beyond what most rippers like dB do.

EAC is for the audiophile, really, but that doesn't mean that it is not user friendly... because it is.

As for the DVD burners, not sure what is going on there.

FLAC is only really necessary for archiving purposes in case something happens to the original copy, in which case you can burn back to CD. providing hd space is plentiful, that's a nice option to have.

for most people however, i'd recommend ripping in 320kb/s MP3 as the sound quality to me isn't distinguishable from FLAC unless you have the right equipment, and it obviously saves a lot of space.

just my humble opinion