Other simpler-to-use rippers ......... have surfaced more recently, such as RipperX, Goobox, and the one that comes bundled with Ubuntu: Sound Juicer.

A digital audio editor is a computer application for audio editing or digital audio manipulation. Usually, a digital audio editor allows the user to record and edit audio, mix multiple sound sources/tracks, apply simple or advanced effects or filters, playback sound, and convert different audio file formats and different sound quality levels.

I’ve compiled a list of some of the most useful Audio applications you can download totally free of charge for Linux.

FFmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It is a very fast video and audio converter and includes libavcodec which is the leading audio/video codec library. It can also grab from a live audio/video source.

If you want to convert audio files on Linux, Audio-convert-mod is worth a try. Audio-convert-mod is a simple and easy-to-use audio file converter. It supports many formats, includes: MP3, OGG, FLAC, WAV, AAC/MP4/M4A, MAC/Monkey’s Audio/APE, MPC (Musepack), WV (wavpack) etc. In addition, with Audio-convert-mod, you can also batch convert audio files.

I spend a lot of time looking at other people’s computers, and I see Audacity installed on a lot of them. Not many software programs deserve the adverb “versatile”, but Audacity is one of them. It is the Swiss Army knife of audio applications.

There are many GUI based CD rippers available for the Linux desktop. While many of these applications do a great job of ripping, I like to understand the underlying technology. For that reason, I decided to figure out how to rip CD's from the command line.

Audacious is a powerful audio player for Linux which resembles the older XMMS, only using GTK2 toolkit for its interface. It supports XMMS and implicitly Winamp 2.x skins, coming with support for various audio formats, including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) or WMA (Windows Media Audio).

Ardour and JACK developer Paul Davis looked at audio from mostly the professional audio perspective, while PulseAudio developer Lennart Poettering, unsurprisingly, discussed desktop audio.