cdparanoia is a compact discripper for *nix and BeOS, developed by Xiph.org. It is designed to be a minimalistic, high-quality CD ripper that would be able to compensate for and adjust to poor hardware to produce a flawless rip. libparanoia is a portable and platform independent library that was made from the important parts ripped from the Linux/gcc-only program cdparanoia. Libparanoia is part of cdrtools.
Design
libparanoia is the foundation of the project and does most of the work, whereas the application cdparanoia is merely an application frontend to libparanoia. The current stable release of the library is Paranoia III. The guiding principle of cdparanoia's design is "Too many features spoil the broth". cdparanoia is designed to rip correctly and know as much as possible about the CD-ROM hardware instead of implementing extraneous features such as a graphical user interface or a CDDB interface.
Development history
cdparanoia is developed by Xiph.org, the same team behind Vorbis and Theora, who provide public Subversionread-only access. The project began as a set of patches to cdda2wav, called Paranoia I and II that provided limited error correction and supported few drives. Paranoia III,, was a standalone library for BeOS and Linux.
Possible future
Paranoia IV, the future development version, is announced to be more flexible, portable and capable. Planned features include parallel port drive support, pregap detection and removal, and NetBSD and Solaris ports. Development seemed to halt some time after 2002, with no public updates to the site and source code for several years, but resumed in August, 2006 with the prerelease of version 10.0. The current development version is still based on cdda2wav code from 1997 and thus does neither contain support for extracting meta data from audio CDs nor workarounds for typical logical defects in CDs that prevented audio extraction with old versions of cdda2wav . As of 2019, none of this has happened. However CD-Paranoia support on other operating systems is available via and its port of .
One of the quirks of cdparanoia is that its ripping status is indicated by an emoticon. As per the cdparanoia manual, the following emoticons are used: :-) 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 re-read; 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
