A cd-ripper is an application that copies audio from CD's into the computer without modifying the digital source. The ripper reads from the CD and saves the audio as .WAV-files. It does not read the audio through the sound card (although most rippers can do that kind of sampling as well). This is called Digital Audio Copy (DAE).

When the audio-tracks are copied to the computer, one can either make perfect copies of the original audio-CD, or, convert the .WAV-files into .MP3-files. Well, if you don't know what MP3's are, I suggest you go check out MP3.com. Although that site is money-controlled and can't be trusted, there are some good links etc.

To be able to use a cd-ripper, one need a good cd-drive. Not all drives can actually read digital audio. When the drive just can not do DAE, most rippers can read the audio using the cd-roms playfunction and then sample the audio. This will not make perfect copys and should only be used as the last alternative if nothing else works.

Microsoft have released their version of compression called WMA. The major rippers have support for this compression. However, the MP3 format is too common that it will take quite a while before WMA will make its way to the big scene.

OK, so you already have some mp3songs and you only want to get them back on a normal cd-audio so you can play them in your car or your home stereo? Then you don't have to read about the rippers below. I have prepared a little page for you who keeps mailing me about this converting mp3 back to cd audio.

I have been testing a whole lot of the cd-rippers available, and the best one is a ripper called Audiograbber. It is really easy to use, has all functions one can possibly need and is the one that can make most of the drives out there read.

It can read via ASPI AND via the older way MSCDEX. For Win2000/NT/XP it also reads using something called Native NT calls. Most of the drives reads best via ASPI, but some older drives can read only via MSCDEX.

Audiograbber works with IDE as well as SCSI-drives and it works under windows 9x/2K/NT/XP. This way, Audiograbber will work for most people. If Audiograbber can't make your CD-drive rip, probably no other ripper will. Read how to get it to do what you want!

Audiograbber 1.80

AG works under Win9x/NT/2000/XP. Works with IDE/SCSI. Full ID3 tag support. Other features are level normalization AND a unique advanced normalization-feature that really rocks, making all tracks average output level be the same instead of just adjusting the peaklevel.

It has automatic silence deletion & WAV file checksums to test if your drive is producing reliable rips. Easy to use, smart-looking interface design. Supports encoding to mp3 via Fraunhofer codec, L3Enc, BladeEnc, Xing, LAME among others.

Has lots of features. Simply the BEST ripper! Audiograbber has full support for FreeDB (lets you fetch (and/or upload) tracknames from a huge Internet database instead of having to enter then manually), and is an excellent CD-Player! Supports almost every SCSI-player there is. Multipel versions can be run at the same time, they can even co-work with each other to rip from one drive at a time, and start ripping from the next drive once the first has finished. Great line-in sampling, including timer-recording (e.g. connect your radio, set the timer and let your computer do the recording of that great radioshow you like so much).

Since AG 1.61 it has different language support, e.g. german, french, italian, swedish and so on. Since AG 1.62 it can rip using NT/2000 internal routines, deleteing the need of an ASPI-manager.

Getting started using Audiograbber!

Audiograbber Question Forum

Freeware LAME DLL encoder

Download free version now, 1.3Mb.

AudioCatalyst 2.1

This is basically the same as AudioGrabber 1.41 but with some slight differences; AudioCatalyst comes with an mp3-encoder made by Xing and can not use any other encoders.

You can use Xing Encoder with Audiograbber if you already have that one installed.

Both rippers are written by Jackie The Hacker. This includes a mp3-player and analog ripping but not the advanced normalization. Also available as macintosh-version.

Xing Forum

CD Copy v4.950

CD-DA Extractor 4.3.3

Music Match 6.1

This is an all-in-one application. It includes I guess almost everything. But the program is not any good. The programmers must have thought "OK, we can't make a good program, so let's make several bad and put them all together and maybe someone will buy it anyway".

I can't understand why people think this is good software! Who designed that horrible GUI?! The download-file is huge. The company behind this product is buying good reviews on the net, so be aware...

This is a program for newbies, not for the pro's, with big lamer-warning.

RealJukebox 2

Made by the company that makes Real Audio. Their own but out-of-date soundcompression wasn't good enough so they bought Xing and made this mp3/ra all-in-one app. Spreads itself all over the system and is very hard to get rid of. Crashed my system while installing.

Two versions of this one, the basic and the plus. The basic is for free but with less sound quality.

WinDAC32 V1.53

Quite good ripper but with a dull userinterface. Works with both IDE & SCSI drives under Win95 & WinNT. Fraunhofer L3CODEC support, integrated ASPI manager, allows you to rip multiple tracks into seperate WAV files, has some good features like spin CD-ROM drive up to speed before ripping to prevent skips, & disable unused drives - for use with CD-ROM changers.

Used to be the best ripper, but has lost its position to Audiograbber a long time ago. Downloadsize only 546Kb!