How-To: Use cdparanoia to Rip Audio CDs

cdparanoia is a command line tool which reads audio CDs and allows you to rip the tracks to WAV files. You can then take those and compress them as FLAC or using a lossy format like Ogg Vorbis or MP3. The last stable release is cdparanoia III 10.0, which is included in Debian Lenny's repositories. To install cdparanoia on Debian, issue the following command as root:

apt-get install cdparanoia

The easiest way to use it is to insert an audio CD and rip all the tracks to default WAV format:

cdparanoia -B

The default output files will be located in the current working directory, under names like track01.cdda.wav, track02.cdda.wav, and so on.

Ripping an audio CD with cdparanoia

Alternately, you can rip only a single track or several tracks:

cdparanoida -B 5

Will rip only track 5, while:

cdparanoida -B 3-7

Will rip all the tracks from 3 to 7, including them. You can also rip a track starting at a certain time up to a certain time. For example, to rip track 2 from seconds 35 up to minute 2 and 30 seconds, you would issue:

cdparanoia "2[:35.00]-2[2:30.00]"

There are plenty more arguments which cdparanoia accepts and for more options see cdparanoia --help and man cdparanoia. You may also find useful the FAQ on the official website.

Updated: Jul 08, 2008 (Created: Jul 08, 2008)