With the copy-protected CD controversy in recent years, music studios are attempting to design CDs to prevent its users from ripping them onto their computer. Exactly what is ripping? It refers to digitally copying the CD's music onto your computer, also known as "ripping CDs". In layman's language - it means grabbing a CD from your shelf, and converting its tracks to audio files onto most of the PC computers. The most popular audio file being used today is the MP3, the abbreviated name for MPEG-1 audio layer three, or Moving Pictures Experts Group. This can be done legally and usually is not, due to the fine print saying if you buy a CD - it is yours to copy for your own use, as long as you don't sell it. After that, it gets "really" hazy in a legal sense.



There are many reasons to rip a CD. One is to get a backup of a favorite song or album, in case it gets ruined or scratched, or even to have just a back-up copy. Songs that are stored on the hard-drive can be backed up with player software, such as Windows Media Player or Winamp. They require a suitable sound card, and speakers or headphones, to use the computer as a musical device. Transferring is possible onto an MP3 music players also, which will allow downloading of audio tracks through a USB cable. Almost all computers can rip audio tracks, as long as they have a CD-ROM or something similar, a soundcard, and headphones or speakers. A couple hundred MB of free hard-drive space or more should be available as each song requires about 3MB to 5MB of space.

Depending on how much power and flexibility needed, a person can order the Smart CD Ripper with a free download trial version, for the Smart CD Ripper software or its Smart CD Ripper Pro version. The Pro version comes with a CD Player, WAV converter, and a MP3 converter. But both programs are an easy-to-use software that allows the user to extract audio tracks directly from personal CDs onto any Windows PC - insert the CD and click on the "rip" and it is done. Ripped in high speed, the software can leave the default MP3/OGG settings as it is user friendly, with a gogo encoder - based on the lame 3.88 with good quality and high speed. The variable bitrate (VBR) offers better quality than constant bitrate (CBR). The difference lies in the fact simple signals can be encoded with less bitrate, when higher bitrate is user to encode more difficult ones - defined by optimization of the used bitrate with the complexity of the audio signal to encode. The CDDB (CD database) is a file located in the WinAmp's plugins directory, containing a local copy of the CDDB Database for the CDs. This Smart Ripper feature will allow the ripping process to automatically receive the name of the artist, the name of the album, the genre, the year of the album, and the names of the songs in the album.

Ripping utilities can be found anywhere, which is an encoded software that encodes audio into several different formats that can be stored onto the hard-drive. The thing to really remember when picking out a ripping software is that many CD-burning applications also rip, although not all ripping utilities support CD-burning. Roxio's Easy CD Creator Platinum 5.1 does it all, through ripping to burning. There are huge numbers of consumers who work with ripping CDs. Statistics from Forrester Research in July of 2002, show us that 36% of the public rip songs from the CD to their hard drives, while 53% burn music on CDs. Slightly less, only 17% of consumers copy music files to an MP3 player, with 40% of consumers using file-sharing software.