CD rippers, as mentioned in the "Make mp3s" page, are the programs that digitally copy the tracks(songs) from the audio CD to the hard disk as ".wav" files. Rippers read directly the digital audio information from the CD and not the analog output signal of the CD player. This way they are making perfect copies of CD tracks.

Ripping a CD could be from very simple to impossible, depending on your CD ROM model, the drivers that are installed on your system and the compatibility of the ripper with both of them.

Rippers use two ways to communicate with your CD ROM drive. The ASPI interface and the MSCDEX interface. There are some deference's between them.

ASPI mode	Works both with IDE and SCSII drives under both Win95 and NT. It is supported by all the rippers in this page, including Audiograbber 1.20 and it is their default mode. However, there are some IDE drives that will refuse to work with an ASPI interface, whatever ASPI drivers version you have installed in your computer.

MSCDEX mode	Works only with IDE drives, but can be vital for some CD ROM models, that can't be ripped with the ASPI mode. MSCDEX mode is supported only by Audiograbber, CDDA 1.7 and CDDA 32.

Practically with any ripper you like. If you are not familiar with command line usage, start with a Windows Ripper. The easiest to use is Audiograbber and the most popular is WinDac. Others like CD Copy offer some convenient features. The only problem with windows rippers is that they almost make your computer useless when you are ripping. DOS Rippers, like CDDA 1.7, on the other hand are great if you want to rip some tracks and using efficiently your computer at the same time, since they use very little system resources.