There are many GUI based CD rippers available for the Linux desktop. While many of these applications do a great job of ripping, I like to understand the underlying technology. For that reason, I decided to figure out how to rip CD's from the command line.

Ripping a CD or DVD is one of the most basic tasks for a PC user. But you need the right tools if you want to automate the process.

GNU/Linux offers several tools for ripping, some specific to the GNOME or KDE desktops, and others more general.

There are a few different programs for ripping DVDs on Linux. The following details my personal experience with four different applications over the last week and a half.

OGMRip is an application and a set of libraries for ripping and encoding DVD into AVI, OGM, MP4, or Matroska files using a wide variety of codecs. It relies on mplayer, mencoder, ogmtools, mkvtoolnix, mp4box, oggenc, lame, and faac to perform its tasks.

cdparanoia is a command line audio CD digital audio extraction application. You can use use it for compiling music in a format suitable for your PC or mobile music player. cdrparanoia is available on almost all linux distributiions.

While large cheap hard disks allow you to keep your audio collection in a lossless format such as FLAC on your home network, when you are on the move you probably want to squeeze the most out of every gigabyte by using a compressed format. This article takes a look at three tools aimed at making audio conversion for portable music players a painless task.

Four years ago I purchased my first Eee PC, an Eee PC 1000HD. This model Eee PC had a battery life rating of just 3 hours in Windows XP and it would only last 1 hour on battery using my distribution of choice at the time, Ubuntu.

Most of us still rely on CD/DVD writing software applications for file backup, data transfer and distribution, and for ripping audio and video content among other things.If you are using Linux, there are plenty of optical disc-authoring programs to choose from. Here are some of those that I like...