RipIT is used to create MPEG-1 Layer 3 (mp3), Flac (flac) or Ogg Vorbis (ogg) audio files from an audio CD and from version 3.4 also faac (m4a). RipIT is a console based front-end (no fancy GUI here), written in perl, for these excellent programs:

- dagrab, cdparanoia or cdda2wav (tosha and cdd are also supported) for ripping the audio CD tracks (I don't know if dagrab is still up to date..., but it's COOL!)
- Lame, OggVorbis, Flac or Faac for encoding the wav files to mp3, ogg, flac or m4a (find some info and links)
- CDDB_get (perl module) for CDDB retrieval (info and links).


Product's homepage

Here are some key features of "RipIT":

· Gets the Audio CD Album/Artist/Tracks information from CDDB
· Rips the Audio CD Tracks
· Encodes to flac, mp3 or ogg
· id3 tags encoded songs
· Creates an playlist (m3u) file
· Can prepare and send a CDDB submission.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Added more encoders: wavpack (encoder 6) and ffmpeg (encoder 7) to be used for exotic formats like "Apple lossless" (whatever that is). Note that usage of ffmpeg might not be straight forward.
· To add coverart use option --coverpath to define the path to the picture to be added to the tags and --coverart to set the list of encoders (formats) to which coverart shall be added (if the cover is present). Option --copycover can be used to copy the cover from the original path to each directory of encoded files. Note that ripit does not download coverart by itself, one needs to provide them manually.
· Option --precmd might be handy to download coverart, it actually executes whatever command providing all metadata of the disc to be ripped. This will happen right before ripping starts. The same arguments can be used as for option --dirtemplate.
· Option --trackoffset adds a constant value to the track counter (used in tracktemplate). This might be helpful if more than one disc of a multidisc release shall be ripped into the same directory.
· Options --vatag and --vastring enables detection of VA style metadata and splits the track title into track-artist and track-title (tags only).
· Option --mp3tags may be used to add special tags to mp3 files not supported by the encoder or other unofficial tags (e. g. a compilation frame not yet known in id3v2.4).
· Option --cdcue creates cue-files (cue-sheets) and merges all tracks into a single file.
· Option --isrc will read out the "International Standard Recording Code" of each track, mainly to submit it to the MusicBrainz DB. For this one needs to send the login information through options --mbname and --mbpass.