Rip Audio CDs
CD rippers are designed to extract ("rip") the raw digital audio (in a format commonly called CDDA) from a compact disc to a file or other output. Most CD rippers also support burning audio to a CD and transcoding it on-the-fly.
Contents
Introduction
Music is usually stored on audio CDs in an uncompressed format (requires a lot of space, e.g. 700MB for only 80 minutes of audio). Extracting the audio from the CD usually involves compressing it so that it requires less space using:
- Lossless compression
- same quality, less space.
- Lossy compression
- lower quality, much less space.
Most common formats to convert to are: APE and FLAC for lossless and MP3 and OGG for lossy.
Ripping
Using a CD ripper
For some examples of CD rippers see: Optical disc drive#Ripping.
Using a shell script
If you want to rip an audio CD gapless and using CD-Text you can use the shell script at [1]. You need to install the mp3splt, cdrtools and vorbis-tools packages, all available in the official repositories.
Post-processing
Tag editors
For some examples of audio tag editors see: List of applications#Audio tag editors.
Converting to other formats
If the CD ripper you used does not support the format you wanted to convert to you can use other encoders/decoders such as FFmpeg or MEncoder. Some simple scripts to convert from flac to MP3 can also be found on the wiki.
See also
- RIAA and actual laws allow backup of physically obtained media under these conditions RIAA - The Law.