cdparanoia

A Linux command line program designed to "rip" digital audio CD's to wav files, which then can be converted to mp3 or Ogg Vorbis formats via an encoder such as bladeenc or oggenc. The "paranoia" angle relates to the extremely thorough error checking used by the program.

I have ripped extremely scratched, unplayable CD's using cdparanoia; the program is quite amazing. A heavily damaged CD can take a while, however. Since Copy Protected CD's typically mimic a damaged CD, cdparanoia can rip these without difficulty.

CDParanoia is a package developed by Xiphophorus, the wonderful group of frostily cool folks also responsible for things like Ogg Vorbis.

The package provides a library for CDDA ripping and a command-line tool. The library is being used in variety of programs; If you want a cool GUI front-end, get a Grip. The library itself works in Linux, but the newer incarnation (Paranoia IV) will also work in some other *NIXes (NetBSD, Solaris and others).

cdparanoia started out as an improvement to earlier tool called cdda2wav, but is now a completely separate program.

It's called "paranoia" because it tries to make sure the data was ripped correctly. It's capable of detecting scratches and working around them as best as it can.

Home page: http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/