Rip Audio CDs - ArchWiki

# Rip Audio CDs

From ArchWiki

Related articles

- Convert FLAC to MP3
- MEncoder
- Codecs

CD rippers are designed to extract the raw digital audio from a compact disc to a file or another output.

## Introduction

Music is usually stored on audio CDs in an uncompressed format which requires a lot of space (e.g. 700MB for only 80 minutes of audio). This is because they have a constant high bitrate of over one megabyte per second. 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 or FLAC for lossless and MP3 or OGG for lossy.

## Ripping

See Optical disc drive#Ripping for a list of available software. For example, to extract audio with cdrtools:

    $ cdda2wav -vall cddb=0 speed=4 -paranoia paraopts=proof -B -D /dev/sr0

Note: Some CD rippers support burning audio to a CD and transcoding on-the-fly.

### Create cue files

To allow cdda2wav to create CUE files, you must also specify `-t all` to switch cdda2wav into a mode that creates a single audio data file for the whole CD.

Alternatively to create a bin and cue file pair from an audio CD use cdrdao. For example:

    $ cdrdao read-cd --read-raw --datafile cdimage.bin cdimage.cue

The cue file generated by this method is not the same as some may expect from tools like EAC. To convert the cdrdao formatted cue files to a "standard" cue file, try yatoc2cueAUR.

## Post-processing

### Tag editors

For some examples of audio tag editors see List of applications/Multimedia#Audio tag editors.

### Convert to other formats

Re-encoding to another format can be done with lame or FFmpeg. For example, to convert the output raw audio files from the example in #Ripping to best quality MP3 with variable bit rate:

    $ lame -V0 input.wav output.mp3

To convert them to FLAC instead:

    $ ffmpeg -i input.wav output.flac

## See also

- RIAA and laws allow backup of physically obtained media under these conditions.

Category:

- Optical disc