# Rip Audio CDs

This article or section is a candidate for merging with Optical Disc Drive.

Notes: There's already Optical disc drive#DVD ripping. (Discuss in Talk:Rip Audio CDs#)

CD rippers are designed to extract ("rip") the raw digital audio (in a format commonly called CDDA) from a compact disc to a file or other output. Most CD rippers also support burning audio to a CD and transcoding it on-the-fly.

## Introduction

Music is usually stored on audio CDs in an uncompressed format (requires a lot of space, e.g. 700MB for only 80 minutes of audio). Extracting the audio from the CD usually involves compressing it so that it requires less space using:

Lossless compression
  same quality, less space.
Lossy compression
  lower quality, much less space.

Most common formats to convert to are: APE and FLAC for lossless and MP3 and OGG for lossy.

## Ripping

### Using a CD ripper

For some examples of CD rippers see: Optical disc drive#Ripping.

### Using a shell script

The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.

Reason: Doesn't pass shellcheck (Discuss in Talk:Rip Audio CDs#)

If you want to rip an audio CD gapless and using CD-Text you can use the shell script at [1]. You need to install the mp3splt, cdrtools and vorbis-tools packages, all available in the official repositories.

## Post-processing

### Tag editors

For some examples of audio tag editors see: List of applications#Audio tag editors.

### Converting to other formats

If the CD ripper you used does not support the format you wanted to convert to you can use other encoders/decoders such as FFmpeg or MEncoder. Some simple scripts to convert from flac to MP3 can also be found on the wiki.

## See also

- RIAA and actual laws allow backup of physically obtained media under these conditions RIAA - The Law.

Category:

- Optical