Copying Music Files from CD to Hard Disk

You can copy music tracks from a CD to your hard disk. It's useful for listening to music without needing to find and insert the CD. Copying the music and distributing it to other people is illegal. Copying the music to your computer and returning the CD for a refund is plain theft. The process of transferring the digital file for a piece of music from an audio CD to hard disk is called ripping. An application that transfers music tracks is called a CD Ripper.

Transferring music from a music CD to the computer's hard drive includes converting the file into a different format. The most popular format is MP3. However, you can store music in the open source format Ogg Vorbis, a format with better compression. If a piece of music is stored in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis in the same size file, the Ogg Vorbis file sounds better.

The Sound Juicer CD Ripper is available in the main menu of most Linux distributions. The Sound Juicer window is shown in Figure 16-5.

Figure 16-5. Sound Juicer CD Ripper.

Sound Juicer reads the CD in the CD drive and lists the tracks. When you click ExTRact, the tracks that are checked are copied to hard disk. You can select the format to save the files in.