cdparanoia is a command-line compact disc ripper for Unix-like operating systems and BeOS developed by Xiph.org. It is designed to be a minimalistic CD ripper which would compensate for sub-par hardware to produce an accurate rip.

libparanoia is a portable and platform-independent library which was made from important components from from the Linux/gcc-only program cdparanoia. Libparanoia is part of the cdrtools suite.

libparanoia is the foundation of the project and does most of the work; the application cdparanoia is its frontend. (The current stable release of the library is Paranoia III.) cdparanoia is by design slow and thorough in ripping every bit from a CD, with the maximum number of default passes or reads being 20. A live output shows the progress and status denoted by emoticons. It can save the audio from discs as WAV, AIFF, AIFF-C, or raw format files.

Several programs provide a graphical frontend to cdparanoia itself, among them RubyRipper and Sound Juicer.

One of the quirks of cdparanoia, in keeping with its minimalist design, is that the ripping status is indicated with an emoticon.