The Rippers |
by Gnomie Matt Gruett
Some people prefer a program that does a variety of MP3 related tasks. Others prefer to individually select each MP3 component - sort of akin to buying an all-in-one stereo system or selectively buying each component (the receiver, the cassette deck, speakers, etc.) to suite your individual needs. Some people could care less about which ripper or encoder they use, while others prefer to select their own rip and encoding software for various reasons such as quality, functionality or speed. If you like to tweak your computer, you're probably the type who would want to install your own ripper and encoder. Hey, if nothing else it sounds impressive, right?
A ripper is a program that extracts audio, used mostly to read the audio files on your audio CD and turn them into WAV files. The misnomer here is that it's often referred to as "ripping MP3s," but what you're really doing is creating an audio file that can be turned into an MP3 by an encoder. Audio CDs store data in a format known as Red Book audio format. This is a special spec that was agreed upon so that any audio CD could play in any CD player. It's almost like a specialized file format. However, it is not readable by your computer's file system by default. A ripper allows you to take the audio tracks on a Red Book CD and copy them, as if they were files, to your computer's hard drive. The ripping is this copying process.
At first there were not too many programs like this available. Plextor was bundling their CD drives with a ripper back in 1996, but hardly anyone knew what it was good for or why you would bother to use it. Now, many CD and CD-R drives come with software that allows you to rip CDs and manufacturers often include the ripping speed on their spec sheet. Even TDK specifically advertises that their veloCD can rip CDs at 32x speed - meaning it can read 32 seconds of audio in one second.
And while most of the free utilities that come with these CD drives are adequate - you guessed it - there are still plenty more rippers out there (both freeware and shareware) that you can get. Some people would argue that it is worth spending money for a quality ripping program to guarantee a low error count on your ripped audio files - the idea being that errors could be introduced to the WAV file from a sloppy ripping process. We don't have time to dig into the quality aspects of extracting audio for now, but suffice it to say that the purists out there would probably rip all of their audio at 1x speed to guarantee that the WAV files they feed into their encoder (which we'll cover next) are the best possible quality they can get.
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