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

Rippers save the audio in a lossless format that does not reduce quality due to compression, such as WAV, FLAC, or even raw PCM audio. After the actual extraction process, one typically encodes the audio using a lossy codec, like MP3, Vorbis, or AAC.

Many all-in-one frontend programs will read the CDDA audio, compress to a lossy format, and name the files according to title, artist, album, and track number information from databases like AMG's LASSO, FreeDB, Gracenote's CDDB or MusicBrainz. This information can also be stored in metadata within the file, such as MP3 ID3 tags.

Some all-in-one programs may also allow "burning" the files to a CD-R, although some quality may be lost if a lossy codec is used. Many all-in-one programs can perform this partially or totally on the fly (although this may require the encoder wait for the extractor or vice-versa depending on the implementation).

The files produced by a CD ripper are typically played back using a media player, although there are many portable MP3 players and network appliances like the iPod that can play them as well.

The first CD ripper was CDDA2WAV from Xing , commonly considered superseded by cdparanoia.

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 (or all-in-one programs)

• abcde a command-line fontend 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]

See also

• DVD ripper
• Hard disk recorder

External links

• Jargon File entry for "rip"