The media files produced by a CD ripper is typically played back using some media player software.
A modern CD ripper will not only extract the CDDA audio portion of a CD, but also encode it on the fly into a compressed file format such as MP3, Vorbis or FLAC. It will often also aid in naming the files according to the title, artist and song numbering information from the audio CD database CDDB or FreeDB.
The first CD ripper was CDDA2WAV[?] from Xing[?]. Nowadays there are many rippers, some of the more popular ones include CDex[?] for Microsoft Windows and GRIP[?] for Linux, both which produce both MP3, FLAC and Vorbis files, as well as they automate CDDB lookups.
CD rippers include:
See also: DVD ripper, Hard disk recorder
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump