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