A CD ripper, CD grabber, or CD extractor is

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

that

rips Rips may refer to: Places * Rips, Sarandë, location in Albania on the border with Greece * De Rips, a village in the Netherlands People * Eliyahu Rips (born 1948), Israeli mathematician * Lance Rips (born 1948), American psychologist * Nicolaia ...

raw

digital audio Digital audio is a representation of sound recorded in, or converted into, digital form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is typically encoded as numerical samples in a continuous sequence. For example, in CD audio, sa ...

in Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) format tracks on a

compact disc The compact disc (CD) is a Digital media, digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then rele ...

to standard computer sound files, such as

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Win ...

or MP3. A more formal term used for the process of ripping audio CDs is digital audio extraction (DAE).

History

In the early days of computer CD-ROM drives and audio compression mechanisms (such as MP2), CD ripping was considered undesirable by copyright holders, with some attempting to retrofit copy protection into the simple ISO9660 standard. As time progressed, most music publishers became more open to the idea that since individuals had bought the music, they should be able to create a copy for their own personal use on their own computer. This is not yet entirely true; even with some current digital music delivery mechanisms, there are considerable restrictions on what an end user can do with their paid for (and therefore personally licensed) audio. Windows Media Player's default behavior is to add copy protection measures to ripped music, with a disclaimer that if this is not done, the end user is held entirely accountable for what is done with their music. This suits most users who simply want to store their music on a memory stick, MP3 player or portable hard disk and listen to it on any PC or compatible device.

Etymology

The

Jargon File The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANET A ...

entry for ''rip'' notes that the term originated in

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...

slang, where it referred to the extraction of multimedia content from program data.

Design

As an intermediate step, some ripping programs save the extracted audio in a lossless format such as

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software p ...

, or even raw

PCM Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a method used to digitally represent sampled analog signals. It is the standard form of digital audio in computers, compact discs, digital telephony and other digital audio applications. In a PCM stream, the amp ...

audio. The extracted audio can then be encoded with a

lossy In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size ...

codec like MP3,

Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjun ...

, WMA or

AAC AAC may refer to: Aviation * Advanced Aircraft, a company from Carlsbad, California * Alaskan Air Command, a radar network * American Aeronautical Corporation, a company from Port Washington, New York * American Aviation, a company from Cleveland, ...

. The encoded files are more compact and are suitable for playback on digital audio players. They may also be played back in a media player program on a computer. Most ripping programs will assist in tagging the encoded files with

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

. The MP3 file format, for example, allows tags with title, artist, album and track number information. Some will try to identify the disc being ripped by looking up network services like AMG's

LASSO A lasso ( or ), also called lariat, riata, or reata (all from Castilian, la reata 're-tied rope'), is a loop of rope designed as a restraint to be thrown around a target and tightened when pulled. It is a well-known tool of the Spanish an ...

FreeDB Freedb was a database of compact disc track listings, where all the content was under the GNU General Public License. To look up CD information over the Internet, a client program calculated a hash function from the CD table of contents and used ...

, Gracenote's CDDB, GD

or MusicBrainz, or attempt text extraction if CD-Text has been stored. Some all-in-one ripping programs can simplify the entire process by ripping and

burning Combustion, or burning, is a high-temperature exothermic redox chemical reaction between a fuel (the reductant) and an oxidant, usually atmospheric oxygen, that produces oxidized, often gaseous products, in a mixture termed as smoke. Combusti ...

the audio to disc in one step, possibly re-encoding the audio on-the-fly in the process. Some CD ripping software is specifically intended to provide an especially accurate or "secure" rip, including

Exact Audio Copy Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is a CD ripping program for Microsoft Windows. The program has been developed by Andre Wiethoff since 1998. Wiethoff's motivation for creating the program was that other such software only performed jitter correction while ...

cdda2wav cdrtools (formerly known as cdrecord) is a collection of independent projects of free software/Open source software, open source computer programs. The project was maintained for over two decades by Jörg Schilling, who died on October 10, 20 ...

CDex CDex is a free software package for Digital Audio Extraction from Audio CD (a so-called CD ripper) and audio format conversion for Microsoft Windows. It converts CDDA tracks from a CD to standard computer sound files, such as WAV, MP3, or Ogg V ...

and cdparanoia.

Compact disc seek jitter

In the context of

digital audio extraction Digital usually refers to something using discrete digits, often binary digits. Technology and computing Hardware *Digital electronics, electronic circuits which operate using digital signals **Digital camera, which captures and stores digital i ...

from

s, seek jitter causes extracted audio samples to be doubled-up or skipped entirely if the Compact Disc drive re-seeks. The problem occurs because the Red Book does not require block-accurate addressing during seeking. As a result, the extraction process may restart a few samples early or late, resulting in doubled or omitted samples. These glitches often sound like tiny repeating clicks during playback. A successful approach to correction in software involves performing overlapping reads and fitting the data to find overlaps at the edges. Most extraction programs perform seek jitter correction. CD manufacturers avoid seek jitter by extracting the entire disc in one continuous read operation, using special CD drive models at slower speeds so the drive does not re-seek.

Optical drive properties

Properties of an optical drive helping in achieving a perfect rip are a small sample-offset (at best zero), no

jitter In electronics and telecommunications, jitter is the deviation from true periodicity of a presumably periodic signal, often in relation to a reference clock signal. In clock recovery applications it is called timing jitter. Jitter is a significa ...

, no or deactivateable

caching In computing, a cache ( ) is a hardware or software component that stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster; the data stored in a cache might be the result of an earlier computation or a copy of data stored elsewher ...

, and a correct implementation and feed-back of the C1 and C2 error-states. There are databases listing these features for multiple brands and versions of optical drives. Also, EAC has the ability to autodetect some of these features by a test-rip of a known reference CD.DAE Drive Features Database - FAQ
(2007)

Examples

Notable CD ripper applications include the following ones: ;

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...

and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

: * Asunder *

Cdda2wav cdrtools (formerly known as cdrecord) is a collection of independent projects of free software/Open source software, open source computer programs. The project was maintained for over two decades by Jörg Schilling, who died on October 10, 20 ...

* cdparanoia * fre:ac * Grip * K3b *

Ripit ripit is a Linux command-line CD ripper originally developed by Simon Quinn. It is a Perl script which can create flac, ogg, mp3, MPEG-4 Part 14#.MP4 versus .M4A, m4a (aac), Audio Lossless Coding, als (mp4), Musepack, mpc, WavPack, wv or other ...

* Sound Juicer * VLC media player ;

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

: * cdparanoia * fre:ac *

iTunes iTunes () is a software program that acts as a media player, media library, mobile device management utility, and the client app for the iTunes Store. Developed by Apple Inc., it is used to purchase, play, download, and organize digital mul ...

* VLC media player ;

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

: *

Audiograbber Audiograbber is a proprietary freeware CD audio extractor/converter program for Microsoft Windows. It was one of the first programs in the genre to become popular. The data extraction algorithm was designed by Jackie Franck and was included in th ...

foobar2000 foobar2000 (often abbreviated as fb2k or f2k) is a freeware audio player for Microsoft Windows, iOS and Android developed by Peter Pawłowski. It has a modular design, which provides user flexibility in configuration and customization. Stan ...

* fre:ac *

* JRiver Media Center * MediaMonkey * Musicmatch Jukebox * VLC media player *

Winamp Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014. Sinc ...

Windows Media Player Windows Media Player (WMP) is the first media player and media library application that was developed by Microsoft for playing audio, video and viewing images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on ...

Notes

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Cd Ripper Ripping