Exact Audio Copy -

Commercial giants like iTunes, Windows Media Player, and later Spotify focused on convenience and streaming. They didn't care about the 16th bit of the 3rd second of the 2nd track. But the community of audiophiles, data hoarders, and music librarians never abandoned EAC. They wrote detailed setup guides, created databases of drive offsets, and shared their perfect log files as proof of their digital virtue.

Wiethoff’s insight was radical:

And the answer changed the way the world preserved its digital music. Every time someone makes a perfect, archival-quality backup of a rare CD, they are following a path first mapped out by a German programmer in 1998 who refused to accept a "good enough" copy. exact audio copy