Cdparanoia

cdparanoia is a command line tool for extracting audio tracks from CD. Its primary features are a lack of them - it focuses on ripping. The main claim to fame, beyond that, is abundant error-checking to ensure a quality rip.

It is notorious for its use of smilies to signify the quality of the audio being ripped.

For example, taken from the cdparanoia man page: :-) Normal operation, low/no jitter :-|  Normal operation, considerable jitter :-/  Read drift :-P  Unreported loss of streaming in atomic read  operation 8-|  Finding  read problems at same point during reread; hard to correct :-0  SCSI/ATAPI transport error :-(  Scratch detected ;-( Gave up trying to perform a correction 8-X  Aborted read due to known, uncorrectable error :^D  Finished extracting

Using cdparanoia as a crude cd player
cdparanoia can be used as a crude compact disc audio player. If one is using esound, for example, the pipeline: cdparanoia "track" - | esdcat

will play the specified track.

Using cdparanoia with SCSI emulation
If /dev/cdrom is configured for cd burning and points to a device such as /dev/scd0, then cdparanoia may look for a "generic SCSI device" in order to handle ripping. One such device is /dev/sga. Normal users will need permission to this device in addition to /dev/cdrom. For example, change the group of /dev/sga to a group the normal user belongs to, then execute chmod 660 /dev/sga