Whipper

Whipper is a digital audio extraction software for Linux (and possibly other Unix-like) systems that is designed for the secure ripping of audio CDs. It is written in the programming language Python and released as free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). It is based on the popular cdparanoia for reading the actual audio data and cdrdao for extracting other side information. It is a fork of its seemingly abandoned predecessor called morituri, which was started by Thomas Vander Stichele and modeled after the popular Windows freeware Exact Audio Copy (EAC). Whipper merged old ignored pull requests and continues the development with bugfixes and new features.

In Fedora and Gentoo, it is available from the official package repositories. For distributions based on Debian, Arch or Slackware, there are third-party or community repositories. It is developped and tested only on Linux but may also work on other Unix-like systems.

Features

Whipper comes with a command-line user interface and has no graphical user interface (GUI) available. From the underlying backend software cdparanoia, it inherits some features essential for secure ripping, such as detecting and compensating for the read offset of the CD drive and bypassing the read cache of CD drives by over-reading. As the only actively maintained Linux software (as of 2019), it can check results against checksums from the online database AccurateRip (both version 1 and 2). It can generate cue sheets and create log files that are structured the same as those of EAC. For fetching metadata there is support for MusicBrainz and limited support for FreeDB. Additionally, it

• detects pre-emphasis on some discs (TOC-based only),
• detects gaps,
• rips hidden tracks,
• can do batch processing, and
• automatically names generated files and directories.

Apart from hardware support, overreading into the lead-out area of a disc requires the cdparanoia backend to be built with a custom code patch.

Whipper does not process C2 error detection codes, does not yet fully support the more reliable subchannel information for pre-emphasis detection, and cannot create CD images in single files.

Usage

Whipper command lines are composed from a tree of subcomands:

$ whipper cd rip
             info
          accurip show
          drive analyze
                list
          image verify
          mblookup
          offset find

Each (sub-)command can be called with the --help or -h option appended to it to get help on that particular command, its available subcommands and options, e.g. whipper cd rip --help. So after

1. identifying the read offset of the CD drive (whipper offset find) with some CD for which checksums are available in the AccurateRip database, or by manually adding it to the configuration file if one already knows the value, and
2. analyzing the drives capabilities/checking for caching (whipper drive analyze),

one should be able to rip away using whipper cd rip. By default, it then creates a folder for each disc as a subfolder of the current working directory in which it places a set of named and tagged FLAC audio files alongside a Cue sheet, an M3U playlist, a TOC, and a log file.

By default though, whipper does not rip any disc that is not officially known to MusicBrainz.

The often very time-consuming default brute-force method for detecting read offsets can be cut short by manually looking up the most promising value to try from the list of known offsets on the AccurateRip website and passing it to whipper: whipper offset find -o NUMBERXX

External links

• Homepage on Github