How do I extract tracks from (“rip”) or copy an audio CD?
Start with the CD-DA FAQ: http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~psyche/cdda/. Take a look at http://come.to/cdspeed to see if your CD-ROM drive is up to the task. EAC, from http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/, is often recommended for extracting (“ripping”) audio tracks. To copy from CD to CD, the source drive needs to support digital audio extraction, which is rare among older drives but very common in current models. Ideally, the copy program will use disc-at-once recording to produce a duplicate that mimics the original as closely as possible (CDRWIN works well; see section (6-1-7)). Some programs will only copy the CD to the hard drive and from there to CD-R, some will allow CD-to-CD directly but only if the source is a SCSI CD-ROM, and some will work with IDE or SCSI. As with copying CD-ROMs, you must be able to read data off of the source drive faster than your recorder is writing. If you can only extract audio at 1x, you’re not going to be able to do a CD-to-CD copy reliably. If you’re just int