CD ripper

A CD ripper is software that extracts raw digital audio in Compact Disc Digital Audio format tracks on a compact disc to standard computer sound files, such as WAV or MP3. A more formal term used for the process of ripping audio CDs is digital audio extraction (DAE). 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 ISO 9660 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. 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. As an intermediate step, some ripping programs save the extracted audio in a lossless format such as WAV. The extracted audio can then be encoded with a lossy codec like MP3. The encoded files are more compact and are suitable for playback on portable media players. Most ripping programs will assist in tagging the encoded files with metadata. The MP3 file format, for example, supports ID3 tag with title, artist, album and track number information.