Ripper

A software program that “grabs” digital audio from a compact disc and transfers it to a computer’s hard drive. The integrity of the data is preserved because the signal does not pass through the computer’s sound card and does not need to be converted to an analog format. The digital-to-digital transfer creates a WAV file that can then be converted into an MP3 file.

To rip is to move the data from the compact disc to the hard drive.