CD ripper
A CD ripper, CD grabber or CD extractor is a piece of software designed to extract raw digital audio (in format commonly called CDDA) from a compact disc to a file or other output.
Introduction
As an intermediate step, some ripping programs save the extracted audio in a lossless (but possibly compressed format) such as WAV, FLAC, or even raw PCM audio.
The extracted audio can then be encoded with a lossy codec like MP3, Vorbis, WMA or AAC. The encoded files are more compact and are suitable for playback on digital audio players. They may also be played back in a media player program on a computer.
Most ripping programs will assist in tagging the encoded files with metadata. The MP3 file format, for example, allows tags with title, artist, album and track number information. Some will try to identify the disc being ripped by looking up network services like AMG's LASSO, FreeDB, Gracenote's CDDB or MusicBrainz, or via attempt text extraction if CD-Text has been stored.
Some all-in-one ripping programs can simplify the entire process by ripping and burning the audio to disc in one step, possibly re-encoding the audio on-the-fly in the process.
The first CD ripper for Unix systems was cdda2wav, now considered superseded by cdparanoia.
The Jargon File entry for rip notes that the term originated in Amiga slang, where it referred to the extraction of multimedia content from program data.
Front-ends (or all-in-one programs)
- Audiograbber [7]
- Amazing CD Ripper [8]
- BonkEnc [9] (Open Source)
- CDex [10] (Open Source)
- dBpoweramp [11]
- Easy CD-DA Extractor [12]
- Exact Audio Copy (EAC) [13]
- foobar2000 [14]
- iTunes [15]
- Musicmatch Jukebox [16]
- Winamp [17]
- Windows Media Player [18]