Help / CD ripping

Play a CD straight from the drive

You can drop a disc in and listen right away, without ripping it first - the CD deck plays your tracks live off the disc, like a classic hi-fi CD player.

Play a disc without ripping

Put a CD in your drive. The deck reads the disc and shows the album, artist, and a numbered track list.
Press play, or click any track in the list to jump straight to it.
Use the transport controls to move around: previous and next, scan back and forward, stop, and a seek bar to scrub within a track.

Because the deck plays directly from the disc, there's a short pause - usually about a second or two - when you start a track or jump to a new one, while the drive reads that part of the disc. This is normal. Once it starts, it plays through smoothly.

What the deck can do

The CD deck is a full retro player, not just a play button:

Track list with the album, artist, and each track's length.
Repeat (whole disc or a single track), shuffle, and an intro scan that plays a short taste of each track.
Program a custom running order by tapping tracks in the sequence you want.
A-B repeat to loop a section between two points you set.
Display themes - recolour the readout to your taste, with five retro colours to pick from.

The CD deck playing from the disc. The readout shows 01 00:09 above the track name BEACON, with PLAY lit at the right and PLAY lit in the row of mode words below it while the rest of that row stays dim. The seek bar has just started, with 03:16 left to run. The middle transport button is a pause button, with previous and scan back to its left and stop, scan forward and next to its right. The RPT, SHUF, PROG, INTRO and A-B mode buttons sit below, and a Rip button at the right. The track list is headed Mabel Emrys, Equinox, 2009, with 01 Beacon highlighted as the playing track and the list running on to 07. Five display colour dots sit under the disc graphic on the left, the green one ringed as selected. — Playing track one straight off the disc.

Playing from disc vs. ripping - what's the difference

These are two different things, and it's worth knowing which you want:

Play from disc is transient. Nothing is saved. The music plays live from the CD while it spins, and when you take the disc out, there's nothing left on your computer. It's perfect for a quick listen.
Ripping saves the disc to your library as proper audio files you keep - tagged, searchable, and playable any time without the CD. Ripping is the way to add an album to your collection.

If you just want to hear an album once, play it from the disc. If you want to keep it, rip it instead - there's a rip option right on the deck.

A couple of things to know

The disc needs to stay in the drive the whole time you're listening, since the audio is coming straight off it.
If you start ripping the disc, the rip takes over the drive for a moment - that's expected, and playback picks back up once it's free.

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