Once you're in the program, click on File, then EAC Options. You should get this:
Match your settings to mine. We don't want to fill missing offset samples with silence, as that will make every extraction LOOK perfect, even if it's not. That's not so good.
We want to synchronize between tracks, we don't want to delete leading and trailing silent blocks (this can cause the first track to be "off") and you don't necessarily want to skip track extraction on read or sync errors, but generally speaking if your disc has a severe error, you won't want to trade it around anyway. The most important thing however, is making sure you're on High Error Recovery Quality. This will mean that if there's a slight error on the disc, it has the most chance to fix it, and you won't even notice.
Now, click on the General Tab:
Use alternate CD play routines is only for listening to the tracks before ripping. Doesn't matter what you do. You want to disable autostart, and really not much of that matters too much, just personal preference. Click on the tools tab now:
Most of this also is meaningless. However, "automatically write status report after extraction" is nice. It's considered good form to include an EAC log of any show you extract, to show that you did it with EAC, and that there were no errors. That's what this will automatically do when you rip a show. Click on the Normalize tab:
NEVER CHECK THIS BOX. EVER. I MEAN REALLY, NOT EVEN IF YOUR SMART BROTHER WHO'S A COMPUTER GENIUS TELLS YOU THAT IT MAKES THINGS SOUND BETTER. SERIOUSLY. NO. NO. NO. NO.
Click on the Filename tab:
Here's where a lot of people go horribly wrong. Copy the following into the naming scheme box: "%A%Ct%N" just like i have it above.
What this will do, is make it where you enter the show information when you rip, and automatically have wonderful, etree-compliant filenames when you rip the show, rather than TRACK01.WAV, TRACK02.WAV etc. Nobody likes seeing someone spread around files like that, and most people hate renaming the things by hand. Now you won't have to. This may not make sense now, but trust me, in about 5 minutes it will.
Click on OK, you're done with this part. The other things don't matter a whole lot. Explore at your leisure, but you don't really need to mess with them.
Now, click on File, and then Drive Options. You should get:
Now, in theory you should have successfully detected your drive features and it should be set up already here. If somehow you didn't, click Detect Read Features, and let it do its thing. You want Secure Mode, followed by whatever options are available for your drive. Paranoid mode isn't really that helpful, and either of the fast modes are not what you're looking for. Don't use them.
Click on the Drive tab:
again, this should already be done for you, but if the box is telling you "autodetect read command now" where mine says "read command MMC1" then you should go ahead and click on the button. Now, click on Offset/Speed:
Hopefully, you've got something, whatever it is for your drive, in the read sample offset correction value. It's fairly important and not having it correct can lead to small erorrs in your rips that may manifest themselves down the road. We don't want that, do we? Again, if your wizard didn't automatically fill all this in, you're going to have to look elsewhere, or wait for the sequel. Click on the Gap Detection tab:
You can select secure if you want, but I haven't seen it make any difference. I also don't believe there's a difference in the detection methods either, so whtaever. Really, this only applies if there are gaps (such as the nasty 2-second variety) on a disc you're trying to rip. You can in some cases have EAC remove these gaps and give you a good show again, but usually it doesn't work out like you figure it might. At any rate, you're done now. Click OK. The Writer tab only applies if you're using EAC to burn with, and I assume if you're going to be doing that, you know what you're doing already and you're not reading this.