ripit: For precise, exacting CD conversions

Among CD ripping tools, I have to say that ripit seems to have its stuff together.

Granted, like some other rippers for the console, ripit primarily relies on some underlying utilities. Depending on your preferences, you can relegate the actual ripping process to cdparanoia, cddda2wav or some other tools.

But ripit has a fantastic number of other options available to it, in addition to the flags passed through to the background utilities. I daresay if you really are keen on controlling the finer points of converting CDs to audio files, ripit might be one of the best choices.

The Arch version, as you can see above, found my optical drive without coaxing, and dashed off to cddb to check the title data.

I did notice that -o flag, which declares a target directory, requires an absolute path, or it assumes you’re ripping to the root directory. By default ripit will leave the target files in your $HOME.

At the end of the day I’m still stuck in an odd place though, in that I don’t have any CDs left and I don’t believe anyone around me still buys them. My homemade backup CD works great with ripit, but after that I’m out of test discs.

But I am sure the worldwide departure from CD-based audio is not over yet. 😉