retrocomputing

Exact Audio Copy. Open source and guaranteed perfect copy. Most fast ones would have single bit errors.

CDex

Nero(n) burning ROM(e)

Later K3B.

Alcohol 120%

Didn't Nero have this on-the-fly (as if flies could burn anything) copying or am I confusing DVD and audio here?

Fooobar2000

Still have so many flac files from that.

Something about a Sheep? I don't remember its name. Just the logo was supposed to be Dolly the Sheep (the one that was cloned).

Windows Media Player did the job for me.

You're going to hate me, I used iTunes for ripping back in the windows XP days. It was the first program I met that would recognize titles and get album art. I used iTunes to manage my collection as well.

I think I just used the ripper in MusicMatch Jukebox that came with my computer. It was only the "shareware" version, so I was limited to 96 kbps.

I still have many of those in my collection. When I throw on the actual CD or hear it in a higher/lossless format, they sound "wrong" because I'm still so used to the crappy 96kbps rips I had with me on my MP3 player for years.

On the plus side, those smaller files let me fit several more songs onto my 64 MB MP3 player from 2001 or so (it used a parallel port to transfer lol)

Winamp

Every time I think back I picture Winamp. And sure enough I looked it up and Winamp could rip tracks and the UI is exactly what I remember

So: Winamp

KAudio....something. It was a KDE tool that could rip and encode in parallel.

CloneCD

Audiograbber with the LAME codec. Actually still have it on my computer. I still buy the random CD now and again and rip it to my media server, and then never touch it again.

i remember acidrip. i remember it was a gtk program, written in some interpreted language: perl or python.

dMC. it might have been the first one i 'found', and just kept using it; up to r9, i think. after that i just used 'whatever' a distro had on linux or wmp on windows.

Winamp. Still do.

Whoa. Blast from the past.

Something command line based on Linux that produced mp3. I don't remember the name.

I was on Linux and used grip

I don't remember what it was called, but it came with a weird spongy thing that was supposed to make it easier to apply sticker labels. I was young and stupid and thought the sponge thing would also copy the label somehow.

That one. Was great. Software used to be fun

Tracker or cdparanoia. IIRC cdparanoia was more reliable.

No idea. Whatever was the kde standard at the time I suppose.

I do remember feeding the online cd database though, back when it was still a group effort, before some asshole stole all of the data (same with the imdb on Usenet).

Started with Music Match Jukebox that came on an install CD with my first ever MP3 player, then windows media player 10 came out. Eventually I learned about FLAC so I re-ripped everything with EAC

cdparanoia. Still do.

I didn't rip CDs but I did use StreamRipper, which was created by my officemate at the time, Jon Clegg (not the British comedian). To avoid getting sued into bankruptcy he eventually had to dissociate himself from the software after record industry lawyers sent him C&D letters - which I just now found online, holy crap! We were working together as contractors at Microsoft at the time. He was a very clever and cool guy. Hope you're out there still kicking ass, Jon!

Not old enough to answer the question, but I used iTunes when I was a wee lad. Now I use Exact Audio Copy.

I don't know about still maintained, but it's one of those pieces of software that did one task, did it well, and the one part you might want to update (the encoder) was a plugin. As such, even though it's not seen any significant update since 2004, it's really the only CD ripper I've ever used. All the way back to some old Pentium machine where ripping and encoding a CD to MP3 took longer than it would to play it. Though the times I've needed it in the past few years has dropped off considerably, and if I had to rip a CD today I'd actually have to boot up an old machine that still has an optical drive.