After applying an EQ profile for my headphones, I discovered that some older audio tracks that I had, particularly lower quality ones, were notably not as good sounding as the rest of my audio library. As a result, I wanted to rip the audio from some of my CDs in order to get better quality ones. Having not done this for several years, I found myself searching for a suitable application to accomplish this. One thing I wanted, along with the tracks themselves, was metadata, either from the disc directly, or from an external source. I eventually landed on whipper, which allows one to get high fidelity tracks from a CD, and with several advanced features.
To use it for the first time, it’s recommended to run:
whipper drive analyse
whipper offset find
This will determine the caching behaviour of the CD drive, as well as identify the numeric offsets it has. This will allow for more optimal and accurate rips. Note that, because the goal is accuracy, the ripping process may be slower than with other applications.
Once complete, the disc can be ripped with: whipper cd rip
This will analyze the tracks, retrieve metadata from MusicBrainz, and extract them in flac format, since this one is a lossless codec. If a different format such as MP3 is desired, a separate application (like VLC) can be used to convert. In any case, I do recommend converting after the fact, if needed, since whipper is designed to rip the most accurate version possible from the disc.
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