CD rip software is available all over the Internet. If you want to rip a cd, you'll need software capable of copying music off your cds. That is what's meant by ripping. Once that music has been copied off the cd, or ripped, it then needs to be converted into a format that can be stored on a computer hard drive. For most music lovers, the preferred end result is to rip a cd to mp3 format.



For optimum sound quality, it's a good idea to perform an interim step by first converting the cd audio tract into a .WAV file. An uncompressed .WAV file will store every bit of the original audio format meaning that the .WAV will be a “true” copy. But its file size will be enormous!

Converting the .WAV file to mp3 format will considerably shrink the file size and it will still maintain much of the sound quality of the original cd. For example, a .WAV that is 50 MB might be only 5 MB as an mp3. The beauty of this small size is that your mp3 player can hold much more of your favorite music!

Some cd rip options

If you're looking for rip cd to mp3 freeware, take a look at CD-Copy. With this software you can convert audio cd ripped tracts to mp3, .WAV, RealAudio and others and you can burn CD audio. It also supports jitter correction and on-the-fly compression.

CD-DA Extractor is a cd rip software shareware application that saves extracted cd audio files to mp3, .WAV and Windows Media Audio. It has support for ID3 tags (which allow you to embed artist, tract, year, and album information and more), has a file converter with sound normalizer, batch support and built-in encoders. It also works with DVD devices so you can rip dvd audio to cd.

Amazing CD ripper truly is amazing. With this comprehensive cd rip software, you really do get it all. Like the other cd rippers, it saves ripped audio tracts to all the popular formats. The software lets users decide which is more important, speed or quality, and selecting is a simple matter of adjusting the cd rip settings. It doesn't create temp files, it can import cd data from free CDDBs and it supports id3 tags. There's a lot more plus you can even use it as a cd player!

Audiograbber is another rip cd to mp3 freeware product. It includes all the features you'd expect from cd rip software plus it's multi-lingual. It can copy music from a cd, from the radio, and even from cassettes and turntables. It's got built-in support for OGG and it can rip cdg disks (karaoke disks).

These are just some of the many cd rip software programs you can either download for free or pay a nominal price to get. If you're not very computer-savvy, consider sending your cd collection to a cd rip service that can do all this tedious and time-consuming work for you in just a few days.