Why do CDParanoia, CDDA2WAV et al. rip files off into WAV format (and other sample formats) but not CDDA format?
WAV and AIFC are simply convenient formats that include enough header information such that multipurpose audio software can uniquely identify the form of the data in the sample. In raw form, mulaw, SND and CDDA look exactly alike to a program like xplay, and are very likely to blow your ears (and stereo) out when played! Header formats are more versatile and safer. By default, cdparanoia and cdda2wav write WAV files. That said, cdparanoia (and cdda2wav) will write raw, headerless formats if explicitly told to. Cdparanoia writes headerless, signed 16 bit, 44.1kHz stero files in little endian format (LSB first) when given the -r option, and the same in big endian (MSB) format when given -R. All files written by cdparanoia are a multiple of 2352 bytes long (minus the header, if any) as required by cd writer software.
