The best and most convenient cd ripping software I found was unironically dolphin, the kde file manager. The first time I opened an audio CD and saw the virtual folders with the different file formats in there it just blew my mind. Just drag and drop them into the right folder on your drive and wait.

xACT doesn't work no more?

Mac user, but hey, as long as it can rip to a raw, uncompressed file, I'm just gonna do my compression with fre:ac. It's on Mac and Windows, so maybe it's on Linux too? If not, I'm sure you know of an encoder you love (I mean ffmpeg can be used in the command line, don't Linux guys love the command line? I love using the terminal on my Mac. Using it to write this post. Kidding, but I do use homebrew.)

I haven't ripped anything in a long long time, but the command line abcde was really nice. Once your config was to your liking, you just put in disc and type abcde, and done.

I used Laser for the first time about 3-4 months ago when I bought an external CD/DVD/Bluray RW. I had a handful of old CDs including audio CDs I wanted to rip before they decayed. Laser worked great. For Albums it was able to find online it filled in all the metadata and let me rip to flac easily. Very friendly UI. I also had a few audio CDs that were high-school chior albums not found on any CD databases. It was straightforward to manually add the Metadata when ripping the CDs.

I plan to keep using Laser as I pick up old CDs at Goodwills and record stores. I’d recommend Laser to others without any concerns.

Thats the one I use too. Its very easy to use.

I always wondered why you needed special software for cd ripping. As a kid I'd imagined it would work exactly like that

Cool. I've been using the excellent cyanrip , but always nice to have GUI options and some of the better ones for CD ripping were unmaintained last time I checked.

I like Whipper or Fre:ac but I’ll give this a try.

I had zero idea this was a thing. A true TIL. Thanks!

Why bother when you can just

abcde

The fancier rippers have testing and database for calibration of each model of optical drive. Basically, every one can have a different offset of a few dozen samples that you probably wouldn't miss*, but if you compensate for that you can match checksums with other people ripping the same disc and know that you have an error-free rip.

*If you are ripping continuous DJ mixes with track markers, you also don't want that gap of missing samples.

Dd and deal with it later.

F