Mp3 faq - Do all CD ROM drives support ripping

Do all CD ROM drives support "ripping" of audio tracks?

Unfortunately not. Any CD drive can play audio CDs, it's true. But the term "ripping" is mostly used to refer to Digital Audio Extraction (i.e. extracting the audio data digitally to the computer, rather than converting it to analogue data in the drive and playing it through the soundcard directly, which is what happens when you "play" an audio CD on your computer drive). Not all CD drives support Digital Audio Extraction... and even for those that do support it, the speed and reliability vary enormously from drive to drive. If your drive absolutely won't do DAE, then you can fall back on "analogue ripping" - i.e. just playing the CD and then recording the analogue signal back through your soundcard... but the results won't be as good as a proper digital rip. Musicmatch supports analogue recording from CDs, for example, or you can just play the CD and then record using a WAV recording program (such as Goldwave from www.goldwave.com).

How do you tell if your drive supports DAE? Well if you have Adaptec Easy CD Creator it has a nice little option in it (under "System tests") for testing your drive to see if it performs DAE, and if so, at what speed. Also other ripper programs, such as CDEX and Exact Audio Copy, give various diagnostic messages if there are problems with the ripping process. I'm afraid I don't know of a free standalone program for testing drives.

top of the page