How do I rip an audio CD to a single file?

At least a command-line application abcde, found in the universe, can handle ripping the whole CD into one file.

After installing, the basic usage would be (in Terminal):

abcde -1 -a default,cue -o wav

The command should create a full-length file with a cue file. Instead of wav, you can use ogg, mp3, flac, spx, mpc, m4a if you have the codecs.

KDE has this functionality built into the desktop! You simply open the audio cd folder and you get:

1. all tracks listed as ogg and mp3 files, each with their own file name.
2. An ogg and mp3 file, named "all" (or similar name) which represents ALL tracks in one file.
3. You also get other codecs listed depending on what is installed.

Now these are not true ogg/mp3 files [yet]. You simply copy any of these virtual files into another folder and kde then creates true audio files in the target folder. Real simple.

See: What really happens with audio CDs in KDE 4.x?

(If you have a Gnome ONLY system (I usually have both available) you might try KDE's K3b program which runs on Gnome, but I am not certain if it has this feature.)

Lets say you have a 17 track album (like Abbey Road).

Stick the CD in you computer, open a command line terminal window and navigate to a directory you want your huge WAV file to end up in. Then issue this command:

cdparanoia 1-17 -w Abbey.wav

1-17 means Tracks 1 to 17 -w means output to a WAV file "Abbey.wav" is the name of the WAV file that will be created.

cdparanoia is pretty neat to rip an audio CD to wav files one file per song. This is a lossless process, and once you have the wav files, you can slice and dice and do anything you want with them, for example concatenate into a single file using sox, for example:

cdparanoia -B
sox *.wav cd.wav