Do all CD ROM drives support “ripping” of audio tracks?
Unfortunately not. Any CD drive can play audio CDs, it’s true. But the term “ripping” is mostly used to refer to Digital Audio Extraction (i.e. extracting the audio data digitally to the computer, rather than converting it to analogue data in the drive and playing it through the soundcard directly, which is what happens when you “play” an audio CD on your computer drive). Not all CD drives support Digital Audio Extraction… and even for those that do support it, the speed and reliability vary enormously from drive to drive. If your drive absolutely won’t do DAE, then you can fall back on “analogue ripping” – i.e. just playing the CD and then recording the analogue signal back through your soundcard… but the results won’t be as good as a proper digital rip. Musicmatch supports analogue recording from CDs, for example, or you can just play the CD and then record using a WAV recording program (such as Goldwave from www.goldwave.com). How do you tell if your drive supports DAE? Well if
