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.
I’ve rarely used CDs/DVDs but AFAIK it’s practically just a copy. Your PC can read the CD’s data, so it just saves that into a file
A straight copy will result in very large wav or aiff files, so there is usually the extra step of encoding it into a smaller compressed format. Lossless compression like FLAC allows for an exact reproduction of the original data, while lossy like mp3 will be an approximation with even smaller file sizes.