A CD ripper is

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

that extracts raw

digital audio Digital audio is a representation of sound recorded in, or converted into, digital signal (signal processing), digital form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is typically encoded as numerical sampling (signal processing), ...

Compact Disc Digital Audio Compact Disc Digital Audio (CDDA or CD-DA), also known as Digital Audio Compact Disc or simply as Audio CD, is the standard format for audio compact discs. The standard is defined in the '' Red Book'' technical specifications, which is why t ...

format tracks on a

compact disc The compact disc (CD) is a Digital media, digital optical disc data storage format co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. It employs the Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) standard and was capable of hol ...

to standard computer sound files, such as WAV or

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

. 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 Ripping is the extraction of digital content from a container, such as a CD, onto a new digital location. Originally, the term meant to rip music from Commodore 64 games. Later, the term was applied to ripping WAV or MP3 files from digital audio ...

was considered undesirable by copyright holders, with some attempting to retrofit copy protection into the

ISO 9660 ISO 9660 (also known as ECMA-119) is a file system for optical disc media. The file system is an international standard available from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Since the specification is publicly available, im ...

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.

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 Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT AI Lab ...

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

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore International, Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-b ...

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 Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statisti ...

format such as WAV. The extracted audio can then be encoded with a lossy codec like

. The encoded files are more compact and are suitable for playback on

digital audio player A portable media player (PMP) or digital audio player (DAP) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. Normally they refer to small, battery-powered devices ...

s. Most ripping programs will assist in tagging the encoded files with

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * 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 lazo ( or ), also called reata or la reata in Mexico, and in the United States riata or lariat (from Mexican Spanish lasso for roping cattle), is a loop of rope designed as a restraint to be thrown around a target and tightened when ...

FreeDB Freedb was a database of User-generated content, user-submitted 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 fr ...

Gracenote Gracenote, Inc. is a company and service that provides music, video, and sports metadata and automatic content recognition (ACR) technologies to entertainment services and companies worldwide. Formerly CDDB ("Compact Disc Data Base"), Gracenote ...

CDDB CDDB, short for Compact Disc Database, is a database for application software, software applications to look up audio CD (compact disc) information over the Internet. This is performed by a client which calculates a (nearly) unique disc Identifier ...

, GD

or

MusicBrainz MusicBrainz is a MetaBrainz project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the CDDB, Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for ...

, or attempt text extraction if

CD-Text CD-Text is an extension of the Red Book Compact Disc specifications standard for audio CDs. It allows storage of additional information (e.g. album name, song name, and artist name) on a standards-compliant audio CD. The specification for CD-T ...

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. Combust ...

the audio to disc in one step, possibly re-encoding the audio on-the-fly in the process. Not all CD rippers read or copy Compact Disc subcodes, a fact exploited by several types of

digital rights management Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures, such as access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM ...

(DRM) to prevent successful copying of discs or to prevent effective use of software copied from discs.

CloneCD CloneCD is proprietary optical disc authoring software for ripping music and data CDs and DVDs, capable of making exact, 1:1 copies even of copy protected discs, bypassing several types of digital rights management (DRM). CloneCD can rip dis ...

is able to copy subcode data to bypass certain types of DRM.

Difficulties in obtaining accurate reproductions

Ripping a CD to audio files that will faithfully reproduce the same CD if burnt again is not trivial. Such a rip (along with a cue sheet file and other metadata describing the layout of the files on the disc) is sometimes referred to as an "accurate", "perfect" or "secure" rip. Some CD ripping software is specifically intended to provide accurate rips, 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 whil ...

, cdda2wav,

CDex CDex is a freeware software package for Digital Audio Extraction from Compact Disc, Audio CD (a so-called CD ripper) and audio format conversion for Microsoft Windows. It converts Compact Disc Digital Audio, CDDA tracks from a CD to standard com ...

, cdparanoia an
whipper
There is also a reference database with hash values of known good rips that can be used to confirm a successful rip and in some cases calibrate parameters for a CD drive. In the context of digital audio extraction 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 standard 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. 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 signifi ...

, no or deactivatable caching, 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 (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...

and

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

: * Asunder * Cdda2wav * cdparanoia * fre:ac * Grip * K3b * Ripit * Sound Juicer *

VLC media player VLC media player (previously the VideoLAN Client) is a free and open-source software, free and open-source, software portability, portable, cross-platform media player software and streaming media Server (computing), server developed by the Vide ...

* ABCDE ;

Mac OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

: * cdparanoia * fre:ac *

iTunes iTunes is a media player, media library, and mobile device management (MDM) utility developed by Apple. It is used to purchase, play, download and organize digital multimedia on personal computers running the macOS and Windows operating s ...

;

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

: * Audiograbber *

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

* fre:ac *

JRiver Media Center JRiver Media Center is a multimedia application that allows the user to play and organize various types of media on a computer running Windows, macOS, or Linux operating systems. Developed by JRiver, Inc., it is offered as shareware. JRiver Me ...

MediaMonkey MediaMonkey is a digital media player and media library application developed by Ventis Media Inc., for organizing and playing audio on Microsoft Windows and Android operating systems. MediaMonkey for Windows (sometimes noted as MMW) includes ...

* Musicmatch Jukebox *

Winamp Winamp is a media player (software), 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 Rad ...

Windows Media Player Windows Media Player (WMP, officially referred to as Windows Media Player Legacy to retronym, distinguish it from Windows Media Player (2022), the new Windows Media Player introduced with Windows 11) is the first media player (application soft ...

Notes

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Cd Ripper Ripping