Ripper brings CD ripping and prep straight into Librarian — insert an audio CD, and Ripper looks up its track and album information automatically, extracts the audio, and walks you through tagging, loudness/silence prep, and marking transitions, all without leaving the app. It picks up where the old TunePrepper™ tool (from the BeOS and Haiku days) left off, rebuilt natively for the modern TuneTracker System.
Ripper is a separate, one-time purchase ($39.95) from the rest of Librarian. If you haven't licensed it yet, the Ripper tab shows a short pitch and a link to buy — along with a field to enter your license key once you have one, right in the tab itself. No relaunch needed; the moment your key validates, the real Ripper interface takes over.
Switch to the Ripper tab and insert an audio CD. Librarian detects it automatically, lists every track with its running time, and immediately looks up album and track information for you — no button to click. From here you can:
Track and Artist are shown here but aren't editable on this screen — that's deliberate. Once you've ripped, the wizard's Attribute Editor step is the real place to correct titles, artists, or anything else, with the full editing tools already built for that job rather than a second, smaller copy of them here.
Two lookups happen automatically, and either is just a starting point — anything that isn't quite right can be fixed in the Attribute Editor after ripping. Ripper queries the free MusicBrainz database using a disc ID computed from the CD's own table of contents. At the same time, it quietly launches Music in the background (never bringing it to the front) to give it a chance to check Gracenote — a commercial database that's often more complete for less mainstream releases — which frequently fills in track titles before MusicBrainz's own lookup even finishes.
Ripped tracks are copied into whichever folder is currently selected in the Station Folders sidebar on the left — the same rule Librarian's drag-and-drop file import already follows. If nothing meaningful is selected (or "All folders" is active), tracks land in your Station's main Music folder.
Whenever the Ripper tab is active, an orange strip appears across the bottom of the window with the controls for the current rip:
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Eject | Ejects the currently inserted disc. |
| Turbo | On by default. See Turbo vs. Secure Mode below. |
| Normalize volume | Measures each ripped track's integrated loudness (SteadyCast™, "Music" target) as part of the rip. Off by default. |
| Trim silence | Measures each ripped track's leading/trailing silence, using Touchups' own default aggressiveness setting. Off by default. |
| Format | The file format ripped tracks are saved as. See Output Formats below. |
| Let 'er rip! | Starts ripping every checked track. |
Normalize volume and Trim silence are the exact same measurements Touchups performs, using Touchups' own defaults (−60 dBFS threshold / 300 ms minimum silence / 50 ms pre-roll for trimming, "Music" target for loudness) — see the Touchups page for full detail on what these values mean and how AutoCast uses them at playback. Like Touchups, both are entirely non-destructive: your ripped audio files are never modified, only annotated in the library.
Both options are off by default because they fully decode each track (twice, if both are checked), which meaningfully slows down a multi-track rip. If you'd rather rip quickly and handle loudness/silence prep afterward, leave them unchecked — you can run the exact same measurements later from the Touchups tab on the ripped tracks whenever you like.
Ripper extracts audio directly from the disc using its own bundled ripping engine (rather than relying only on macOS's own CD driver), which gives it real control over extraction speed and accuracy:
If a track fails to extract cleanly in Turbo mode, Ripper automatically retries that one track in Secure mode and posts "Possibly damaged track, switching to normal speed rip." to the status bar at the bottom of the window — you don't need to notice the failure or intervene yourself.
Choose the format ripped tracks are saved in from the Format dropdown in the action strip:
| Format | Notes |
|---|---|
| AIFF | Lossless. The default. |
| WAV | Lossless. |
| ALAC (Lossless) | Apple Lossless — smaller than AIFF/WAV with no quality loss. |
| AAC (M4A) | Lossy, smaller files. |
| FLAC | Lossless, smaller than AIFF/WAV. |
Your last choice is remembered the next time you open Librarian.
MP3 isn't offered. Apple's own audio tools can decode MP3 but not encode it, so producing MP3 output would require bundling a separate third-party encoder — a deliberate scope decision for this feature. All five formats above are fully compatible with the rest of the TuneTracker suite.
Once ripping finishes, the action strip walks you through finishing the job on the tracks you just ripped:
A ← Back button lets you revisit an earlier step, and every step can be skipped — clicking Next never requires you to have actually changed anything on that page first. When you reach the end, the strip shows "All done!" along with a New Rip button that returns you to the Ripper tab ready to start over.
The wizard is just a guided shortcut — it isn't the only way to work with ripped tracks. If you leave it partway through, or want to come back later, your ripped tracks are ordinary songs in your library like any other. Find them anytime using the Newest Additions filter, or just browse to wherever they landed in your Station Folders, and edit them using the Attributes, Transitions, or Touchups tabs exactly as you would any other song.
Once Ripper is activated, About Librarian (under the Librarian menu) shows who it's registered to — "Ripper licensed to (your name), (your key)" — just below the version and company information.