I’ve never ripped CDs or DVDs before for any reason and am curious how this works since I have some stuff I wanna see about backing up but am nervous about ruining the disc. I’ve tried looking this up, but every time I do, I obviously am searching for the wrong thing because I have never found the info I’m looking for.
The data on the CD/DVD is read using the exact same mechanism as for normal play, only instead of it being sent to the circuitry that decodes it and transforms the results into audio and video signals, it’s just picked up by a normal processor as data like any other. Specifically in “ripping”, the software that’s running on that generic CPU and which is controlling the CD/DVD reader to extract the disk contents as data, generally just does some data processing (for example, the audio in CDs is in an uncompressed format similar to WAV, so it’s usually converted to something like the MP3 or FLAC formats to make it much smaller) and the result ends up stored in the hard disk as a file.
The core point is that CDs/DVDs already store data as bits and bytes which you can read as many times as you want, and “ripping” is really just having software using a generic CPU and generic CD/DVD drive to read those bytes for the purpose of storing the data in files rather than for the purpose of sending it to the circuitry that generates audio and/or video signals.
PS: Often the generic CD readers used with generic CPUs also have the audio decoding circuitry inside, so they can run both in the above mentioned mode for extracting data controlled by the CPU, and in a “play” mode were they use that internal circuitry to internally decode the data and just output an audio signal directly (all without the CPU receiving and decoding any data) so maybe that’s the source of the confusion between “playing” and “ripping”?!