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.
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 either:
- Lossless compression
- same quality, roughly 1/2 the size. Examples: APE and FLAC
- Lossy compression
- lower quality, roughly 1/10 the size. Examples: MP3 and OGG
Ripping
See Optical disc drive#Ripping for a list of available software. For example, to extract audio with the community package cdrtools:
$ cdda2wav -vall cddb=0 speed=4 -paranoia paraopts=proof -B -D /dev/sr0
Some CD rippers support burning audio to a CD and transcoding on-the-fly (e.g. cdda2mp3).
Creating 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.
Converting to other formats
Re-encoding to another format can be done with lame, flac or FFmpeg. For example, to convert the output raw audio files from #Ripping to highest quality variable bitrate MP3:
$ lame -V0 input.wav
To convert them to FLAC instead:
$ flac input.wav
See also
- RIAA allow backup of physically obtained media under these conditions.
- lame(1) manual page, for options and presets.
- Hydrogenaudio's description of recommended LAME encoder settings.