So, you’ve liberated yourself from the prison of proprietary audio formats like MP3 and decided to move to an open format with growing industry support and a far superior sound quality: you’ve selected FLAC. And if you run a GNU/Linux distro on your computer, there may not be a more bulletproof tool than Rubyripper for making high-quality (almost exact) copies of your audio CDs in the FLAC format. How to install Rubyripper on a Debian-based distro To get the latest release, browse to http://code.google.com/p/rubyripper/downloads/list. At the time of this writing, the current version is Rubyripper-0.6.0. Download and extract to a directory of your choosing. You’ll need a few prerequisites and some recommended packages — on Debian 5.0.5 (lenny): $ sudo apt-get install cdparanoia ruby cd-discid eject vorbisgain normalize-audio [...]