CD RIPPER

A CD ripper is a piece of software which is tailored to extract raw digital audio from compact discs. The audio format on compact discs is commonly called CDDA.

The media files produced by a CD ripper are typically played back using media player software.

A modern CD ripper will not only extract the CDDA audio portion of a CD, but also encode it on the fly into a compressed file format such as MP3, Vorbis or FLAC. It will often also aid in naming the files according to the title, artist and song numbering information from audio CD databases like CDDB or FreeDB.

The first CD ripper was CDDA2WAV from Xing. Nowadays there are many rippers; two of the more popular ones are CDex for Microsoft Windows and GRIP for Linux, both of which produce both MP3, FLAC and Vorbis files as well as automating CDDB lookups.

CD rippers include:

• CDDA2WAV from Xing
• CDex for Microsoft Windows
• GRIP for Linux
• iTunes for Mac OS
• MusicMatch Jukebox

See also: DVD ripper, Hard disk recorder

External links

• CDex
• GRIP