Ripping Audio CDs at the Command Line

ripit is a Perl script that acts as a front-end to any one of several audio encoders and CD software. Using a set of options that you specify, ripit does the following:

• Gets information about the CD and its tracks from Gracenote (formerly CDDB), an online repository of CD information.
• Converts the tracks on the CD to digital format.
• Encodes the digital files to MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, or FACC formats.

Throughout the ripping process, ripit will ask you for input. You can either accept the script's defaults or enter the information that you want.

Obviously, you'll need to download the archiving that contains the script. Then, extract the file ripit.pl from the archive and copy it to a directory in your path. I put it in the directory /usr/local/bin.

To use ripit, you need Perl (which is usually installed with Linux), an encoder like LAME, a piece of free software for creating MP3 files), and a utility called cdparanoia. You'll also need a Perl module called CDDB_get which is used for getting information from, and posting it to, Gracenote.

Put a CD in your CD-ROM drive, open a terminal window, and type ripit.pl at the command line. The script will walk you through the CD ripping process and then rip all of the tracks on the CD.

Of course, you might want to exercise a little more control over the way in which ripit does its job. That's where the script's options come in.

ripit has a large number of options. You can get a full listing of the script's options by typing ripit -h at the command line. You'll find though, that you'll use fewer than 10 of them. Here is one of the more useful ones:

The --outputdir <directory> option specifies the folder into which your MP3 files will be written.