| 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 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Xing, commonly considered superseded by cdparanoia.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)
Backends
External links
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