Ripping

Ripping is transferring the content of a CD to a hard disk.

More about ripping can be found here.

CUETools

Part of CUETools is CUERipper.

CUERipper is an utility for extracting digital audio from CDs, an open-source alternative to EAC. It has a lot fewer configuration options, so is somewhat easier to use, and is included in CUETools package. It supports MusicBrainz and freeDB metadata databases, AccurateRip and CTDB.

EAC

In secure mode this program either reads every audio sector at least twice or rely on extended error information that some drives are able to return with the audio data. That is one reason why the program is slower than other rippers. But by using this technique non-identical sectors are detected. If an error occurs (read or sync error), the program keeps on reading this sector, until eight of 16 retries are identical, but at maximum one, three or five times (according to the selected error recovery quality) these 16 retries are read. So, in the worst case, bad sectors are read up to 82 times! But this effort will help the program to obtain the best result by comparing all of the retries.

EAC configuration guide - Hydrogen Audio

dBpoweramp

Nicknamed the Swiss army knife of audio, it is considered to be as good as EAC but a bit faster and easy to configure.

Example of a report by dBpoweramp

 

Information ripping to FLAC, 'Track 1' to 'C:\Music\Work\Holt\Doelen Ensemble\Simeon Ten Holt; Palimpsest\01 Doelen Ensemble - Palimpset, for string septet; No. 1, Introduction.flac'
Track 1: Ripped LBA 0 to 31225 (6:56) in 0:37. Filename: C:\Music\Work\Holt\Doelen Ensemble\Simeon Ten Holt; Palimpsest\01 Doelen Ensemble - Palimpset, for string septet; No. 1, Introduction.flac
AccurateRip: Accurate (confidence 2) [Pass 1]
CRC32: 11A55B65 AccurateRip CRC: 7C8E8135 [DiscID: 011-00189ba3-00cdcb7b-910c290b-1]

dBpoweramp CD Ripper: Setup Guide

 

dBpoweramp extract information from AMG, SonataDB, Music Brains and FreeDB.

You can inspect the result and choose the one you prefer before you start to rip.

AccurateRip

The philosophy behind AccurateRip is quite simple - each time an audio track is ripped (recorded by computer) it is compared with rips from other people, this allows a confidence report to be generated. The report might say that 4 other people had exactly the same results, this would guarantee your rip was without error, or the report could say that 3 other people disagree with your rip, the likely hood is that your CD has a scratch and should be cleaned.

You can’t buy AccurateRip.
Either it is part of your ripping software or it isn’t.
Rippers using AccurateRip:

 

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