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What are some CD ripping programs for Ubuntu? Can you list the Pros? What are the Cons? For each program there should be a screenshot, sources to install, and instructions to install and use.

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    This should probably be a community wiki... Aug 10, 2010 at 20:43

16 Answers 16

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Ubuntu Default CD Ripping Software :

To rip a CD, you will require a suitable CD-ripping application. One is installed by default on Ubuntu, and there are others available through Ubuntu's software channels, as reported in the Ubuntu Documentation.

Sound Juicer

Sound Juicer is Ubuntu's default CD-ripping application, and also has the ability to play your CDs and download track data from the Internet.

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To rip a CD using Sound Juicer, simply insert an audio CD; Sound Juicer should start automatically. Alternatively, you can select Sound Juicer from Applications -> Sound & Video -> Audio CD Extractor. By default, the CD will be encoded into the OggVorbis format, a Free Format. If you wish to rip a CD to a non-free format such as MP3 or AAC, you will need to install some additional software.

Kubuntu Default CD Ripping Software :

There are two methods of ripping an Audio CD in a default installation of Kubuntu. One is using Konqueror's audiocd:/ KIO-slave and the other is KaudioCreator (KMenu->Multimedia->KaudioCreator). On inserting the Audio CD, you should be presented with the KDE Audio CD Daemon asking you what you wish to do. To use the KIO-slave method (which is relatively easier), select the 'Open in a new Window' option. Or, if you prefer using KAudioCreator, select the Extract and Encode Audio tracks option.

Using audiocd:/ to rip a CD

In Konqueror's location bar, type audiocd:/ and press enter. You should now see the tracks in the CD along with folders named Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3 etc. Click on the folder which corresponds to the format in which you wish to encode, eg. Ogg Vorbis.

Now, copy the tracks that you need from that folder and paste it in the desired location (/home/kubuntu in the example). The tracks are automagically ripped, encoded and copied to the location you specified!

Note: Copying speeds might not be as fast as those achieved when copying a file directly from the CD as the files are also being ripped and encoded. If you wish to modify some of the settings (like editing the tagging sytax or modifying the encoding settings), you can access it either through System Settings (KMenu->System Settings->Sound and Multimedia->Audio CD) or through KDE Control Center (kcontrol).

Using KAudioCreator

Launch KaudioCreator (Kmenu->Multimedia->KaudioCreator). It should automatically display the tracks in the disc. You can modify the settings to suit your needs (Settings->Configure KaudioCreator), and also choose an encoder. Click on the Rip Selection icon to start the Ripping and encoding process.

Other CD Ripping Software : In alphabetical order.

ABCDE

Those who want a no-nosense, fast, customizable ripping solution should try ABCDE.

And example conversion from CD to AAC/MP4:

abcde -a cddb,read,encode,tag,move,playlist,clean -d /dev/cdrom -o m4a -V -x

Asunder

Asunder is an easy-to-use, plain CD ripper that converts into MP3, OGG, FLAC, WAV, and the new open codec WavPack. Asunder is in the Ubuntu repository and can be installed with Synaptic or Software Center.

Grip

I have been using Grip until Edgy. It's very easy to use but still very configurable.

Note: Grip is no longer supported by its developers, or by Debian or Ubuntu. It has been removed from the repositories in Ubuntu 9.10.

Ripper X

To install:

sudo apt-get install ripperx

RubyRipper

RubyRipper has been recommended in many forum threads and seems to be one of Linux's best ripping solutions. Also, many feel the closest to EAC in quality of rips.

RubyRipper is not included in the default Ubuntu install and is not included in any of the repositories. Fortunately there is a DEB package available.

To install:

1.Install dependencies by typing in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install cd-discid cdparanoia flac lame mp3gain normalize-audio ruby-gnome2 ruby vorbisgain

2.Download the DEB package from here and follow the instructions.

Alternate install:

Open a terminal window and type:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:aheck/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rubyripper
sudo apt-get install rubyripper-gtk
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Well, rhythmbox itself is able to rip CDs and get album data from the MusicBrainz database.

If you insert a CD, a CD icon appears in the Rhythmbox's side bar at the left. Right click it and choose "Extract to library". Make sure to have the format set to the one you want (probably MP3): Edit -> Preferences -> Music -> Preferred Format.

In the current version, 3.3 (on Ubuntu 16.10), rather than right-clicking the CD icon, you click the "Extract" button in the main window.

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    Quick and easy. And the best thing: you don't have to install any additional apps
    – daniels
    Jul 28, 2016 at 16:34
  • There is no "Extract" button on RhythmBox 3.4.4. I don't see any options to rip using RhythmBox on Ubuntu 20.04.
    – user643722
    Nov 2, 2020 at 16:10
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    @user643722 click on the 3 dots button at the top of the window and then "extract"
    – Bogdan
    Dec 14, 2021 at 8:20
  • It doesn't seem to support ripping to MP3 out of the box.
    – k314159
    Jan 18, 2023 at 10:19
  • I haven't been using rhythmbox in a long time, but I think you need to enable universe/multiverse repositories (help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu) and then install the ubuntu-restricted-addons package. Jan 18, 2023 at 14:53
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The current CD rippers in Ubuntu are terrible. The least worst CD Ripper for Linux is the venerable k3b

Why it is the best:

  • you can set a high paranoia level to correct scratch errors reading your CD. Set to 3 for the best correction (as good as Exact Audio Copy)
  • it queries MusicBrainz and FreeDB and CDTEXT
  • you have the most sophisticated options of path and filename configurationn
  • You can easily configure a variable bitrate and it will obey what you configured (I'm looking at you SoundJuicer and RhythmBox)
  • Accents are correctly saved in file names and metadata (Take that RubyRipper!)

Why it is not good:

  • If your CD isn't in MusicBrainz or FreeDB, there's no easy way to submit it. SoundJuicer is better in this point.
  • it won't record the track number in your MP3 metadata, so won't be able to listen the CD as the artist intended. You must go to "MP3 (lame)" configuration and add --tn %n option. Since you are there, also add the option --tv TPE2=%r to get Album Artist metadata recorded.
  • you can't freely write in the genre field, you are subjected to FreeDB limited and American centric selection
  • It is inefficient to edit track and artists names, you have to go to the field and click F2 to edit each field
  • every time you start to rip you must remember to click "load saved configurations", or you will have your ripped files in an undesired format. K3b has a weird config option. In Misc → Default action dialog setting, you must select "saved setting". It doesn't display the last one used by default.
  • no cover art (Clementine usually takes care of that)

Remember that you'll need to install KDE libs to use it.

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  • "every time you start to rip you must remember to click "load saved configurations"" With version 2.0.2. the saved configuration can be used as a default, so you it is preset.
    – Torsten
    Dec 25, 2014 at 13:54
  • @Torsten: Ops, discovered. K3b has a weird config option. In Misc → Default action dialog setting, you must select "saved setting".
    – neves
    May 11, 2015 at 3:49
  • CDTEXT totally saved me tonight for an obscure concert recording. Lots of special characters I did not want to type.
    – jocull
    Apr 5, 2018 at 23:55
  • Not good: with v21.12.3, the options set in pref/lame plugin are just ignored.
    – calandoa
    Nov 17, 2022 at 14:08
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A lot of time has passed since this Q&A was updated, but it is still the best (only?) "CD Ripper" thread in AskUbuntu (I think).

As of this contribution, the developer for Ruby Ripper writes: "The best current way to rip audio is Morituri, which is available in Precise and beyond."

NOT mentioned to date in this Q&A, Morituri "is a CD ripper aiming for accuracy over speed. Its features are modeled to compare with Exact Audio Copy on Windows." At the moment the README on Github notes as a "Known Issue": "no GUI yet".

Development on Grip, "a GTK-based CD-player and CD-ripper / MP3 encoder", was mentioned above as having slowed down, and so it seems to be, but that hasn't stopped it from being well used.

And maybe it's worth noting Flacon as well in this thread: "Flacon extracts individual tracks from one big audio file containing the entire album of music and saves them as separate audio files." On 2015-09-10 WebUpd8 posted some information about it (including installation instructions) with the Flacon 1.2.0 release.

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  • Morituri is terrible if you have to edit your album track names. If your have some non mainstream music, it is useless. I can't compile Grip any more.
    – neves
    May 11, 2015 at 3:00
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I use ABCDE that is a very good ripper :

abcde -a cddb,read,encode,tag,move,playlist,clean -d /dev/cdrom -o m4a -V -x
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I had the same question. I wanted a programme that would create FLAC and MP3. After researching it a bit I came across Asunder CD Ripper. Seems to do everything I need of a ripping programme.

From the Description:

Asunder is a graphical Audio CD ripper and encoder. It can be used to save tracks from Audio CDs. Main features are: Supports WAV, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and Wavpack audio files Uses CDDB to name and tag each track Can encode to multiple formats in one session Creates M3U playlists Allows for each track to be by a different artist Does not require a specific desktop environment (just GTK+)

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  • Bad answer. Where can I get it? What are some of it's features + limitations? I it free / open source? Please edit to include.
    – Tim
    Aug 16, 2014 at 11:35
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If you want quality rips, then I recommend EAC running inside of Wine.

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  • Sorry, I fail to see how EAC could provide quality that most native apps can't, not that it's a bad app, but native is usually preferred ;)
    – invert
    Aug 11, 2010 at 9:47
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    Well, for one it has AcurrateRip support. Other then that, it has been designed from the ground up for detecting and correct read errors. I don't think any native app comes cloes to that. RubyRipper is basically a brute-force hack, but still does not implement all the techniques that EAC has.
    – cmcginty
    Aug 19, 2010 at 1:45
  • @cmcginty what is AcurateRip other than a fancy marketing term? Could you please elaborate? Do you refer to that checking of the CRC in particular? Dec 7, 2020 at 15:58
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I know I'm rather late to the party, but I love using ripit on the command-line. This perl script is available in the repositories and relies on several programs such as cdparanoia, but you need to have the encoders such as flac or vorbis installed if you want to encode in those formats.

The great thing about it is that it gets all the audio CD information from CDDB or Musicbrainz so the tracks are labeled correctly. The tracks can be tagged with ID3 tags and a playlist can be created. After the rip, a properly labeled folder containing correctly labeled tracks will be found in the location specified.

There is a choice of encoders; choose -coder 1 for oggenc, -coder 2 for flac and so on; and choose the quality with -q and specify a value between 1 and 10; -q 8 will encode in 256 KBit/s. For more information see man ripit or see the Ubuntu manpage online.

A sample burn command that I use regularly is:

ripit -eject -d /dev/sr1 -coder 1 -q 8 -o ~/Music

Explanation: -d /dev/sr1 specifies the optical drive with your cd in (you can find out what it yours is with sudo lshw -c disk and install lshw if necessary); -coder 1 -q 8 is the ogg encoder with quality level 8; -o ~/Music means save the output to /home/mike/Music.

Note: if there is any hidden data on the cd inserted, you will need to note the response from ripit and then simply add 1-10 (if there are ten tracks) after /dev/sr1.

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Sound Juicer works well for me. Take a look at the community docs, or project website for more info.

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  • I've just discovered that suddenly Sound Juicer stopped to obey my rip configurations. All the MP3s I've ripped in a date somewhere in the past have a 32Kb bitrate. I'll have to re-rip everything again. I hate this sofware! To configure the ripping preferences is overly complicated: catlingmindswipe.blogspot.com.br/2012/11/… And remember: it can suddenly stop to follow your configuration.
    – neves
    Oct 9, 2014 at 4:53
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I use Banshee as my audio player and it does ripping pretty damned well too. Insert the CD, it'll pull down the album contents, click copy and it rips it to the library, tags set and everything.

The format settings are a little less configurable than a dedicated ripper but I just default to FLAC and that's fine for me.

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I love Rubyripper but this issue has me using the CLI version on 10.04. I can't post more than one link here, but there is a good overview of Rubyripper's features at the hydrogenaudio.org Knowledgebase

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Audex is an easy to use audio CD ripping application

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I had a real bad time trying to do this on Ubuntu 18.04 using various popular apps such as Audacity, Rhythmbox, and Sound-juicer. One common problem seemed to be the interface to MusicBrainz, which refused to populate my data even though it had an accurate "stub" entry for the CD I was using. There was something else that affected more than one of these apps that made it nearly impossible to even enter the track data manually -- basically the keyboard interface was bizarrely half-broken.

Finally, ripperx got the job done. Maybe the magic was that it uses "CDDB" instead of MusicBrainz. Sometimes, older is better.

sudo apt install ripperx

The only difficulty I had was that the CD source wasn't configurable in the application and I needed to use the command line to sudo ln -sf sr1 cdrom to specify the correct device.


Bonus note: Test playback of an MP3 using the ancient madplay from the command-line using Bash Process Substitution to modernize the output piping:

madplay temp.mp3 -o wave:>(aplay)

BTW: “MP3 is dead” missed the real, much better story

Something else that may come in handy: accessing CD tracks from the file system

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Be wary, and check online before you waste your time on downloads that are junk. Sound Juicer is great if you only want OGG files, currently there is no access to preferences, you may be able to get that menu item back by fiddling with crap and searching on the internet - I've been at it for an hour and have given up - just want to rip to my iPod Sound Juicer is just junk for me.

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fre:ac is a free audio converter and CD ripper. It works on multiple platforms including Ubuntu. You can install from Snap or Flatpak and it is available via AppImage, too.

It supports "MP3, M4A/AAC, FLAC, WMA, Opus, Ogg Vorbis, Speex, Monkey's Audio (APE), WavPack, WAV and other formats."

One of its best features, for those who like to have lossless audio for highest-quality, and prefer MP3s for portability and not using too much storage, it supports ripping to multiple formats simultaneously via "meh!" (multi encoder hub) via Options -> General Settings -> Encoders. Select meh! and configure options for the formats you prefer.

It pulls metadata from CDDB and it works well for popular CDs. I've only run into a few more esoteric albums that it didn't have info for.

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A good graphical option is xfca, which stands for "X Convert File Audio". The official website is here (in French though).

To install, run:

sudo apt-get install xfca cdparanoia cd-discid

The latter two are needed if one wants to download CD metadata.

The interface is very straightforward, as you can see below:

enter image description here

It also includes a command line option, xcfa_cli, which complete manual can be accessed from man xcfa_cli.

Also, this program integrates with gmusicbrowser, in case you use that music player.

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    xfca isn't a known package. So either you are using a specific repository or more than the default, which would be good to point out then. Dec 7, 2020 at 16:01

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