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It's time for some translation.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
'Ripping' CDs, Part 1: What it means, why it matters


June 19, 2005


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, The Post-Standard

   My living-room CD player is getting awfully lonely.
   The last time I put in a disk to play music was more than a year ago. That's not because I've stopped listening to music. It's just that I rip all my CDs these days. I play them on my computer in a different form.
   Hold it a second. "Ripping" doesn't mean tearing a CD into pieces. It's geek speak for converting the music on a CD in one quick pass -- from CD audio to MP3 audio, for example. CD audio is what we call the files on music CDs. MP3 audio is a reduced-quality version of those files. They don't take up much space, so you're able to put a lot more music onto a disk that way.
   Am I talking too geeky here? Does this make sense to you?
   Any computer user under the age of 17 knows all this intuitively. Kids apparently are born with this sort of knowledge. (I think nature exchanged the frontal lobe that controls how well teenagers clean their rooms with one that shows them how to rip CDs.) Those of us old enough to remember Richard Nixon probably have to put our mental transmission into neutral for a while when this stuff comes up.
   I think it's time for some translation. This week's article is just for old folks -- anyone over 40. The rest of you can continue reading on one condition -- that you promise not to make fun of the rest of us.
   Ready? Here's the most important part: The music you listen to on your favorite CDs is digital. It's stored in files. Your home CD player doesn't show you the files, but they're there. Trust me. Your computer is digital also. That's how it works. Nobody ever points that out any more, but it's the soul of modern technology: Everything related to computing is digital
   Put those two facts together and you get ripping. Or, well, you WILL get ripping as soon as you do a little marriage ceremony. Do you, CD audio, take MP3 as your partner in wedded audio bliss? Once those two methods get cozy, you can strike up the band, call the caterer and rip those CDs all you want.
   Here's how it works. Software on your computer grabs each audio CD file off the CD and quickly converts it into another kind of digital music. Usually that's MP3. Then it stores the MP3 version of the CD audio file on your computer's hard drive. When you want to listen to that music, you just click on the MP3 version and it plays.
   Converting from audio CD files to MP3 files used to take a long time, about four times as long as the playing time of the music, back when nobody quite knew how to do this. In those times, everything was slower than a rebate check. These days the procedure is blazingly fast. With a 52X CD drive and a fast computer, music on an audio CD can be converted so rapidly that it's literally ripped off the CD. A 45-minute CD can be converted in a minute or two with the latest computers.
   But speed isn't the real advantage when you rip CDs. What matters more than anything else is that the music stays in digital form when you rip it. If you convert music the other way -- if you convert a digital audio file to old-fashioned analog audio (the kind recorded by your old cassette deck, for example) and then convert it back to digital, you're a loser. More politely, your music is a loser, because each time music goes from digital to analog or from analog to digital, it gets wrung out a little. It loses some of its quality.
   Ripping guards against that by doing all the conversion in what geeks call the "digital domain." Digital signals are made up of bits and beeps, more or less, and if you add a bit here or take away a bleep there, you can keep everything sounding good.
   Ahem. I hate to bring this up. But I have to. You'll keep everything sounding good only if you learn a couple of things about MP3 files. You've already learned enough for this week, so we'll save the MP3 quality lesson for next week. Meanwhile, remember that "ripping" isn't the same as tearing things up. I wouldn't want you to wreck your CDs.
   Next: The many flavors of MP3s, and how to make sure you get the best.