Contents:
I get it.
You've got a stack of CDs, Luna is sitting there waiting, and the last thing you want right now is to read a manual the size of a small novel.
So here is what you actually need to know to get a CD ripped:
That's enough to get going.
If everything makes sense, go rescue some CDs from the cupboard.
If you want to know what all the clever stuff means, keep reading.
Luna CD Ripper is a Windows CD ripping and archival program designed from the start with blind and screen reader users in mind.
The idea is simple: you put a CD in, Luna works out what it is, helps you make sure the tags are right, rips the audio, checks that what came off the disc is trustworthy and leaves you with properly named, properly tagged files instead of another mysterious folder called "Audio CD".
Luna is not just trying to get audio off a disc as quickly as possible.
It also tries to tell you how much confidence you should have in that audio.
That is why you will see things such as Secure verification, AccurateRip, C2 information, rescue reads, output integrity and archive manifests throughout the program.
You do not need to become an expert in all of this to use Luna, but the information is there when you want it.
Luna is designed to be usable with a screen reader and a keyboard.
The tab key moves through controls, arrow keys move through lists and menus, and the important progress and verification information is exposed as text rather than only as pretty graphics that are no use to half the people reading this manual.
From left to right, or roughly in tab order depending on your Windows configuration, you will find the following:
The track list also has a context menu.
Select a track and press your applications key, or shift F10, and you can edit its title, album, artist, genre or year individually.
Luna does not sit there constantly poking an empty CD drive.
That sounds like a strange thing to point out in a manual, but some Windows optical drive combinations get rather grumpy when programs aggressively probe an empty tray.
Instead, Luna listens for Windows telling it that CD media has changed.
When Windows reports a disc insertion, Luna waits briefly for the drive to settle and then performs one refresh.
If the drive was not ready in time, Luna leaves it alone rather than hammering it repeatedly.
In that case, just use Refresh yourself once the drive has stopped making whatever collection of clicks, whirs and thoughtful noises it has decided are necessary.
You can refresh in any of these ways:
If you have more than one optical drive, Luna asks which one you want to use.
Once the disc has been read, the track list is populated and Lookup tracks becomes available.
CD audio itself normally does not contain a lovely complete set of album tags waiting to be copied into your FLAC files.
Luna therefore combines several sources to work out what you have inserted.
The rough order is:
Not necessarily.
Network services can occasionally take their sweet time about answering.
The metadata progress dialog tells you which stage Luna is currently working on and how long that stage has been running.
For example, you may hear or read "Querying MusicBrainz for this disc - 14 seconds elapsed."
The elapsed time is there on purpose.
A request taking 20 seconds and a program being frozen for 20 seconds feel very similar if all you have is a silent progress bar.
Luna would rather tell you what it is waiting for.
Cover artwork is not supposed to hold up the main metadata result.
Once Luna knows the MusicBrainz release, artwork can continue downloading on its own background thread.
The Cover artwork status field on the main window tells you what is happening.
For example you may see:
So if Luna has already told you that the metadata is ready but artwork still says downloading, yes, it really is carrying on after the main lookup has finished.
Do not panic.
A CD not being in MusicBrainz or GnuDB does not make the CD unrippable.
Luna can use CD-TEXT where available and you can enter the information manually.
The audio ripping and verification systems are separate from whether somebody has catalogued the release online.
The Disc menu contains quick entries for Title, Artist, Genre and Year.
It also contains Edit all metadata, which opens the fuller metadata editor.
You can also use Edit metadata from the Review album before ripping window.
This is useful when the online result is nearly right but has one of those wonderfully helpful database entries where the artist is correct, the album is correct, and track 7 has somehow been named after a completely different song.
Select a track in the main track list and open its context menu with the applications key or shift F10.
You can edit the title, album, artist, genre or year for that track without changing the others.
Options, Set output directory tells Luna where your music archive lives.
Luna checks that this location can actually be written to and checks for sensible free space before the rip starts.
Luna currently offers the following output formats:
If you are creating an archive that you want to keep for years, FLAC is the sensible default.
It is lossless, supports useful tags and usually takes considerably less space than WAV.
MP3 and Ogg are useful when size or compatibility matters more than keeping the exact decoded PCM.
Options, Set name format lets you choose how Luna builds folders and file names.
The available substitutions are:
The default layout is:
%albumartist\%album\%discdir%tracknum - %name
In other words, a normal album ends up neatly underneath its artist and album directory, while a multi-disc release can gain separate CD folders automatically.
Luna also sanitises names that Windows would otherwise object to.
A CD is not a hard drive.
It is an optical disc being read by a mechanical drive, and scratches, fingerprints, awkward pressing defects and occasionally the mood of the hardware can all affect what comes back.
With Secure ripping enabled, Luna does not blindly assume that one read is perfect.
It can compare repeated reads, use C2 error information where the drive genuinely provides it, identify unstable regions and perform targeted rescue reads when necessary.
On a clean disc that gets a strong AccurateRip match, Luna can accept that independent evidence without doing a pointless second complete read of the track.
If the evidence is not good enough, it becomes more conservative rather than pretending everything is fine.
Secure ripping is enabled by default and is the mode I recommend for building a long-term archive.
You can change it from Options, Secure ripping.
AccurateRip is an external database of CD rip checksums.
Luna calculates checksums for the audio it has read and can compare them with checksums submitted by other people for the same disc pressing.
A confident match is extremely useful because it is independent evidence that your rip agrees with other known rips.
That is not automatically a failure.
Some discs, pressings and obscure releases simply are not represented in the database.
Luna can still use its own secure repeat-read evidence.
The results screen deliberately shows AccurateRip and local verification separately for this reason.
Different CD drives can begin their sample stream a tiny number of samples early or late compared with another drive.
AccurateRip uses drive offsets to account for this.
Luna will try to resolve the offset automatically where possible.
Options, Set AccurateRip drive offset lets you enter a known offset manually.
Enter auto to forget a saved manual value and let Luna try to look it up again.
Unless you know what an offset is and why you are changing it, leaving this alone is usually the right answer.
When you click Review and rip, Luna does not immediately start chewing through the disc.
It first gives you the Review album before ripping screen.
This screen shows:
If something is wrong, choose Edit metadata or Go back.
If everything looks right, choose Rip this CD.
This review is intentional.
A secure bit-perfect rip with the wrong artist and a typo in every title is still a beautifully verified mess.
The ripping screen contains two progress gauges, a persistent requested drive speed field, textual rip status and an Abort button.
CD Progress tells you how far Luna is through the disc.
Track progress tells you how far it is through the current track.
Luna reports actual decoded PCM throughput in CD speed multiples.
You may hear something such as:
"Reading at 12.7x CD speed; average 12.4x. Track 68% complete."
This number can go up and down.
Optical drives change speed, move across different parts of the disc and may slow themselves when they encounter an area they want to read more carefully.
A short dip is not automatically a problem.
The verification result at the end matters more than whether the drive sounded particularly enthusiastic for every second of the rip.
Luna also has a field named CD drive requested speed.
This records what Luna asked the drive to do before the main read, separately from the actual throughput measurement.
That distinction is useful when diagnosing a drive that chooses to behave differently from what it was asked to do.
Choose Abort to cancel the current rip.
Cancellation is cooperative; Luna lets the current low-level operation stop safely rather than simply ripping the rug out from underneath a write in progress.
Incomplete temporary output files are cleaned up and are not presented as finished archive tracks.
When a rip completes, Luna opens a results window containing one row per track.
This is the bit where Luna stops being a file converter and tells you how trustworthy the archive actually is.
Columns include:
Archive verified is the result you want to see.
It means Luna has enough evidence to call that track verified according to the methods available for that disc and drive.
A warning does not necessarily mean the file is unusable.
It means Luna could not prove the track as strongly as it wanted to.
Read the AccurateRip, local verification and rescue evidence columns before deciding what to do next.
For an important or visibly damaged disc, another attempt or another optical drive may be worthwhile.
Luna does not stop at "FFmpeg exited with code zero, therefore everything must be wonderful."
Finished files are reopened and checked so Luna can catch cases where the final encoded artifact is missing, damaged or inconsistent with what was expected.
The results screen can also let you copy the verification summary, open the detailed rip log, open the archive manifest and open the textual Disc Archaeology report when those files are available.
Luna writes a detailed rip log alongside an archived album.
This contains the evidence and decisions behind the friendly summary you see on screen.
If you ever need to work out what happened years later, this is the file to read.
The Luna Archive Manifest records the archived tracks and their hashes.
It gives Luna something concrete to re-check later rather than asking you to trust that a file has not silently changed just because Windows Explorer still shows it in the folder.
Luna can create a CUE sheet describing the disc layout and track positions.
This is useful archival information when you care about the structure of the original CD as well as the individual music files.
Disc Archaeology is Luna's textual report about less ordinary things found on a disc.
It can include information such as mixed audio/data layouts, track indexes, pregaps, UPC/MCN, ISRCs, pre-emphasis and possible hidden audio before track 1 where the drive exposes that information.
It is deliberately a text file because "we detected something interesting" is not much help if the only evidence is hidden in a graphical diagram your screen reader cannot read.
Some CDs contain audio in the pregap before the first normal track, often called HTOA or Hidden Track One Audio.
When Luna sees a plausible first-track pregap and the drive can read it, Luna checks it after the ordinary tracks are safely archived.
It only keeps the result when it detects real audio and can get repeatable evidence rather than treating several seconds of silence as a fascinating archaeological discovery.
Some older CDs were mastered with pre-emphasis.
When Luna detects this, it keeps the verified archive master unchanged and can create separate de-emphasised playback derivatives.
That way you keep the original samples while also getting a copy intended to sound correct during normal playback.
Luna calculates ReplayGain after the tracks are safely encoded.
ReplayGain stores playback-volume information in metadata; it does not rewrite the archived audio samples simply to make one album louder or quieter.
If you are staring at a box containing 101 CDs and questioning various life choices, Batch archive mode is for you.
Enable Options, Batch archive mode: eject after a successful disc.
After a successful rip and after Luna has shown you any verification warnings, Luna ejects the finished disc and prompts you for the next one.
It does not automatically start ripping the next CD; you still get the metadata and review stage first.
Options, Batch session summary shows the current batch history so you can keep track of what has happened during a long archiving session.
Options, Revalidate archived library scans a Luna archive for Luna Archive Manifest files and checks the stored SHA-256 hashes against the files that exist now.
This lets Luna distinguish files that still verify from files that are missing, changed or corrupt.
It is useful after moving a large library to a new drive, restoring from backup, or simply several years down the line when you would like a little evidence that the collection is still what you think it is.
Normal Windows keyboard navigation also applies.
Use tab and shift tab to move between controls, arrow keys to move through lists and menus, Enter to activate the focused item and Escape to leave dialogs where appropriate.
Wait for the drive to settle, then press F5 or control R.
Automatic media detection is deliberately gentle; Luna would rather miss an automatic refresh occasionally than spend its life hammering an empty optical drive.
Read the status text.
Luna tells you which online stage it is waiting for and how long that stage has been running.
MusicBrainz or GnuDB can occasionally be slow even though Luna itself is still responsive.
Check the Cover artwork status field.
Artwork is allowed to continue after the main metadata result, so this can be perfectly normal.
That does not mean the rip failed.
Look at Local verification and Archive status as well.
An uncommon pressing may simply not have an AccurateRip entry yet.
That can happen.
Watch the actual read-speed status and, more importantly, the verification result.
Optical drives are mechanical devices and may alter their own speed while moving around the disc or retrying a difficult area.
Read the reason shown underneath the message.
Useful reports include the exact error, which track you were on, whether it happens every time and what the drive was doing immediately before the failure.
The detailed rip log may also have been written even when the full disc did not complete.
Luna gives you the technical ability to copy audio from a CD.
That does not automatically give you the legal right to copy, redistribute or publish whatever is on it.
Copyright and private-copying rules differ by country and by material.
You are responsible for making sure that your ripping and later use of the resulting files is lawful.
Do not use Luna to distribute music or other copyrighted material unless you have the rights or permission required to do so.
Metadata and cover artwork obtained from third-party services also remain subject to the rights and terms that apply to those services and materials.
See the supplied End User Licence Agreement for the full software licence terms.
That's useful!
CD drives are surprisingly inventive pieces of hardware and no amount of testing can make every drive, every pressing and every damaged disc behave identically.
When reporting a problem, please include:
Nathan Tech contact page:
https://nathantech.net/contact.php
And, finally, if Luna just successfully turned a shelf full of old CDs into a properly tagged music archive: excellent.
That was the point.