CD ripper

In the early days of computer CD-ROM drives and audio compression mechanisms (such as MP2), CD ripping was considered undesirable by copyright holders, with some attempting to retrofit copy protection into the simple ISO9660 standard.

This is not yet entirely true; even with some current digital music delivery mechanisms, there are considerable restrictions on what an end user can do with their paid for (and therefore personally licensed) audio.

The Jargon File entry for rip notes that the term originated in Amiga slang, where it referred to the extraction of multimedia content from program data.

Some will try to identify the disc being ripped by looking up network services like AMG's LASSO, FreeDB, Gracenote's CDDB, GD3 [1] or MusicBrainz, or attempt text extraction if CD-Text has been stored.

Properties of an optical drive helping in achieving a perfect rip are a small sample offset (at best zero), no jitter, no or deactivatable caching, and a correct implementation and feed-back of the C1 and C2 error states.