CD ripper

A CD ripper, CD grabber, or CD extractor is software that convert tracks on a Compact Disc to standard computer sound files, such as WAV, MP3, or Ogg Vorbis.

It rips raw digital audio in CD-DA format on a compact disc to a file or other output.

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 behaviour 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.

The Jargon File entry for rip notes that the term originated in Amiga slang, where it referred to the extraction of multimedia content from program data. Another term used for the process of ripping Audio-CDs is Digital Audio Extraction (DAE).

As an intermediate step, some ripping programs save the extracted audio in a lossless format such as WAV, FLAC, or even raw PCM audio. The extracted audio can then be encoded with a lossy codec like MP3, Vorbis, WMA or AAC. 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.

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