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.

CD Ripping with Linux doesn’t have to be the labor intensive task that it once was. No longer do we have the days of writing a hundred character command to rip a CD with the perfect options. Here are some utilities aimed at making your life of ripping your collection of CD’s to a digital format you can actually use.

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.

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.

Listening to the music played back from original audio CDs on a home computer creates clear discomfort — the CD drive is being blocked and the CDs have to be changed again and again (unless you have a home jukebox). Now it’s time we learn to rip (grab) our own audio collection and save it to a hard disk in the form of .mp3, .ogg, or .flac files.

I guess all Linux users, especially Ubuntu ones, have used or at least heard about Automatix, an application that can install and uninstall the most used and popular programs. From multimedia codecs and archiving tools, e-mail clients and web browsers, to audio/video ripping and burning software, Automatix could do them all.

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.

Subtitles may not mean much for the English-speaking part of the world, but for the rest of us, they are the difference between truly enjoying a movie or just watching the screen, trying to decipher the events. While Windows has a nice variety of tools to manipulate subtitles, Linux applications too can accomplish such tasks. From editing to ripping to converting, here is a list of some useful tools.