CD ripper
A CD ripper, CD grabber or CD extractor is a piece of software which is tailored to extract raw digital audio from compact discs (in format commonly called CDDA with extension .cda) to computer hard disk. Rippers usually save the audio in a format that does not reduce quality due to compression, such as WAV or FLAC, or even as raw PCM audio. After the actual extraction process, it is common to encode the audio using a lossy codec, like MP3 or Vorbis, although many modern rippers can bypass that stage and are capable of encoding to on the fly.
Many all-in-one programs will rip the CDDA audio, compress to a lossy format, and also aid in naming the files according to the title, artist and track numbering information from audio CD databases like CDDB or MusicBrainz. This information can also be stored in metadata within the audio file, as is the case with the ID3 tags of the MP3 format. Such all-in-one programs may also provide a means of "burning" the audio files to a blank CD-R media, though some quality will be lost from the original if a lossy codec is used.
The media files produced by a CD ripper are typically played back using media player software, although there are also portable MP3 players like Apple Computer's iPod that can play audio files.
The first CD ripper was CDDA2WAV from Xing. Nowadays there are many rippers; two of the more popular ones are CDex for Microsoft Windows and GRIP for Linux, both of which produce both MP3, FLAC and Vorbis files as well as automating CDDB lookups.
The Jargon File entry for rip tracks the use of that term back to Amiga home computer user slang for extracting multimedia information from machine readable content.
Front Ends
- abcde a command-line front end for Linux and Unix [1]
- CDex for Microsoft Windows [2]
- dBpowerAMP for Microsoft Windows
- GRIP front end for Linux [3]
- iTunes for Mac OS or Microsoft Windows
- Musicmatch Jukebox [4]
Backends
- Cdda2wav [5]
- cdparanoia back end for Unix and Unix-like systems, from the Xiph.org Foundation [6]