How do I rip an audio CD using VLC?

Solution 1:

I had the same problem. It turned out that in the first menu 'start position' was set to track "0". Simply changing it to 1 or whatever track you want to rip should solve it

Solution 2:

Try resetting your preferences, by going to Tools->Preferences and clicking on Reset Preferences. Apparently changing the bitrate even once garbles the output.

You might also try this batch file.

There are many other ripping tools recommended on Superuser, as well (see here for Linux, and here for Windows).