Why is it called "Ripping"

[J-P_L]

Wasn’t sure if this should be here or in GQ.

I’ve been ripping some CD’s to MP3’s lately, so the question came to mind.

Why is it called “Ripping”, is it because it is considered ripping off the music industry, or does the process has another origin?

[troub]

Tried to think back to when I first started using/hearing the term, and was actually having difficulty. A search brought me here: http://www.theeggeadventure.com/QandA/ripping.htm

I think the meaning of the word is more closely to that of ripping a page out of a magazine. Getting the music or graphics out of a game or demo was not a straight forward task and you had to be both crafty and sneaky to do it. Even five years ago, getting the audio off of a CD in digital form was left only to uber-geeks.
…
It originally came from Amiga/Atari/Commie64 D00DZ that used to “rip” audio and graphic images from games, and it often implied that a bit of hacking was necessary to extract the data. Apparently it’s now used to refer to directly reading the digital data from an audio CD; while the connection is somewhat obvious, there’s rarely any hacking involved on the part of the ripper grin

This pretty much jibes with what my gut feeling of the origin was, that I was having trouble expressing. You’re extracting what you want from the disc. “Ripping” is just a cooler-sounding word for it

[Rrose_Selavy]

Because it’s also a process that usually involves transferring copyrighted material from otherwise fixed commercial recordings - into another different format.
ripping - also implies some selective “force” required – rather than a gentle lifting or copying.

[Harmonious_Discord]

Ripping refers to a direct data copy of a media instead of playing the media and recording it with software. You rip the the wanted data from the source material. You grab what you want or rip it out.

[troub]

@Harmonious_Discord

Ripping refers to a direct data copy of a media instead of playing the media and recording it with software. You rip the the wanted data from the source material. You grab what you want or rip it out.

Oh yes, this distinction too. It was never called “ripping” when we were all copying tapes, or copying CDs to tapes. It’s “ripping” when you’re directly extracting the data, rather than capturing the playback.

[Lemur866]

Ripping a CD is different than copying, because you’re not simply copying the CD files, you’re extracting the CD information and translating it into mp3 format. You can copy a CD, but that’s not ripping, that’s creating a new CD that’s the same as the old CD. If you rip the CD you end up with mp3 (or whatever) files rather than a CD.

[twickster]

Since the (musical) content of the files involved are irrelevant to the question, I’m moving this from Cafe Society to GQ.

[Mr_Downtown]

The term arose about the same time we began to use the term RIP and then ripping to describe Raster Image Processing: creation of analog artwork (such as typography) from digital files. So I’ve always assumed it was a sort of sloppy transference from one computer application to another, much as we talk about a DSL or cable “modem.”

Support for this theory here.