The media files produced by a CD ripper are typically played back using 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 audio CD databases like CDDB or FreeDB.
The first CD ripper was CDDA2WAV from Xing. Nowadays there are many rippers; two of the more popular ones are CDex for Microsoft Windows and GRIP for Linux, both of which produce both MP3, FLAC and Vorbis files as well as automating CDDB lookups.
CD rippers include: