Cdparanoia extracts audio from compact discs directly as data, with no analog step between, and writes the data to a file or pipe in WAV, AIFC, AIFC or raw 16 bit linear PCM. The Paranoia IV library (to be released with cdparanoia as alpha 10) is a larger effort to provide uniform generic (packet) and specialized interfaces across platforms.

Cdparanoia is a bit different than most other CDDA extration tools. It contains few-to-no 'extra' features, concentrating only on the ripping process and knowing as much as possible about the hardware performing it. Cdparanoia will read correct, rock-solid audio data from inexpensive drives prone to misalignment, frame jitter and loss of streaming during atomic reads. Cdparanoia will also read and repair data from CDs that have been damaged in some way.

At the same time, however, cdparanoia turns out to be easy to use and administrate; It has no compile time configuration, happily autodetecting the CDROM, its type, its interface and other aspects of the ripping process at runtime. A single binary can serve the diverse hardware of the do-it-yourself computer laboratory from Hell...