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.
Creating bin/cue files from CD
One can create a bin/cue file pair from an audio CD by using cdrdao from the shell:
$ cdrdao read-cd --read-raw --datafile cdimage.bin cdimage.cue
The cue file generated by this method is not the same as some users may expect from tools such as EAC on Windows. To convert the cdrdao formatted cue files to the "standard" cue file, one can use yatoc2cueAUR.
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.