Ripping
Ripping is simply the process of copying media from an optical disc (or disc image) onto your computer, and converting the media into standard media file types. You can rip both Audio discs and unprotected DVD and BluRay content. You have a wide variety of formats you can use to rip your music, including mp3, wmv, and lossless formats such as wav or ape. A search on Interact or the Internet will provide information about the various formats.
Disc Types
Media Center can rip:
- Compact Disc Digital Audio (redbook) discs
- Unencrypted DVD-Video discs
- Unencrypted Blu-ray discs
Generally, MC will handle ripping unencrypted discs. If your disc is "infected" with copy protection of any kind, the ripping process may not work right, or may not produce high-quality copies of the source media. You may be able to bypass copy protection to allow you to rip your disc using a third-party "on the fly" decrypting application such as SlySoft's AnyDVD.
Ripping Discs
To access this feature, insert your disc into your computer's optical drive and then go to:
- Action Window > Rip Disc
If you have more than one optical Drive, you can rip multiple discs at the same time. For more information on the ripping process for different disc types, please refer to the following articles:
Third-Party Tools
Media Center's audio disc ripping tools are full-featured and produce rips of equal or better quality than other third-party ripping tools. There's little reason to use anything else for quality reasons. However, if you find discs that aren't available in YADB, you may want to use another tool to look up metadata for the rip. A good, free audio ripping application that can access the GraceNote database is Exact Audio Copy (EAC). If you find one of these, please submit it to YADB after you get the metadata looked up!
For more conversion options when ripping Blu-ray and DVD video, you may want to check out MakeMKV which can rip losslessly directly into convenient MKV files.