It didn’t take long for people to look for ways to extract the music and graphics from the games. The Amiga was an extremely popular home computer in the ’80s and ’90s, renowned for its audio and graphics capabilities. “Ripping off” a CD to a cassette tape to play in your car sounds like it could plausibly be responsible for the start of this term’s popularity.

In fact, many vehicles only had tape players at the time, with the CD car stereo not becoming popular until a number of years later.

At the time, people were likely referring to either copying the CD using expensive duplication hardware or simply recording the contents to other media such as cassette tape. Some people believe that shortly after the release of CDs in the 1980’s people began discussing ways to “rip off” the music held on them. I’m sure you’ve heard the term “rip off”, generally meaning to steal something. Unfortunately, we may never know the true origin of the word “rip” (in the context of ripping a CD) but there are are two popular theories: Theory 1: Rip-Off a CD Before we get into the mechanics of all this, let’s explore from where the term “rip” originates. There are various ways to rip a CD, there are numerous different software packages to help with the task and a whole host of means to store the audio. To put it very simply, “rip a cd” means to copy the digital audio from a compact disc (CD) and to store it as a file. For some people (like myself) who have been on the datahoarding scene for years, it’s sometimes seen as a silly question but we need to remember that we all had to start our datahoarding journey somewhere. This question is asked at least once a month on the various datahoarding forums and subreddits. If you’ve ever wondered what it means to “rip a CD” then you’re not alone.

Best format for ripping cds