Running EAC on Wine

Here is a short note on running Exact Audio Copy (EAC) with Wine, tested with Wine 9.0 and NixOS. It allows Linux users to produce CD rips that 100-percent-log enthusiasts are happy with.

#Steps

Install Wine and plug an optical drive into your Linux machine.

Find the /dev entry corresponding to your optical drive, e.g., /dev/sr0.

Create a directory in an arbitrary position, e.g. /media/cd1. Append the following line to /etc/fstab.

/dev/sr0 /media/cd1 auto ro,user,noauto,unhide 0 0

Note that you do not need to mount anything. Just ensure the fstab entry and the target directory exist.

Run winecfg. In its Drivers tab, add a drive configuration targeting /media/cd1 with the type “CD-ROM.”

Download the EAC installer, e.g., from its official site. Then run the installer:

wine eac-1.6.exe

Delete cdrdao.exe. It always crashes, but EAC works without it.

rm "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files/Exact Audio Copy/CDRDAO/cdrdao.exe"

Run EAC.

wine EAC.exe

It should be able to rip your CD now. You still need to configure EAC to produce log files that 100-percent-log enthusiasts find happy, but that is beyond the scope of this article.

#Known Problems

1. Sometimes, EAC suddenly freezes and quits shortly (Bug 46856). Nobody knows why currently. But luckily, it does not occur often.

2. In the cuesheet (.cue file) produced by EAC with Wine, all non-ASCII characters become a dot (U+002E, “.”). EAC on Windows treats these characters normally. The log files are not affected.