To 'Rip a CD' means to copy the song tracks as files from a musical Compact Disc and storing them in a library on your computer. The opposite of Ripping a CD is called 'Burning'.
Burning is when you have downloaded music files from the internet, such as mp3s and then recording them onto a blank Compact Disc and create your own Audio CD to playback on a CD player device.
When Ripping or Burning a CD, you use certain kind of software which allows you to do both of those things. Windows Media Player, ITunes, Real Audio, MusicMatch, Winamp are all media playing software programs that also support burning and ripping.
To Rip a CD allows one to copy the songs off a CD onto their computer, and most software will even allow you to choose the size/quality/format of how you want to save them. The songs on the CD will be in .WAV format, which are aprox. 40-100mb in size and have no 'compression'. When you rip songs from the CD normaly what happens is they get saved in a compressed format (the size of the files shrinks to around a 10th of the original size!)
The default compressed size for an mp3 is 128 kbps which is the best feasible option if you want to save space on your hard drive and be able to play your songs at an acceptable quality. A lot of the digital information of an uncompressed music file is inaudible to the human ear I would think, therefore the mp3 standard eliminates those inaudible datum from the CD song without affecting the actual song itself.
160kbps is the higher better quality compression for the mp3, and then you can go even better with 192kbps. It all depends on the nature of the music file, the size of your storage medium and individual preferences at the end of the day.
When 'Burning' , you are recording music on to your blank CD. To do this, the music files must be saved as .WAV files, since I haven't done any burning in years I'd imagine software these days gives the user many options as to how go abouts recording songs back onto CD. If you have 15 mp3s, the software will most probably convert them to a suitable format to record back onto CD and then calculate how much space is available to record and inform you no more is left on the CD.
My advice to you is, use Windows Media Player as its free. Fire up the program, and at the top appears a series of 'flash' animated buttons. The first two are round 'back and forward' buttons, the next ones are 'Now Playing' , 'Rip' , 'Burn' , 'Sync' and 'Msn Music UK' (last one perhaps for UK users).
insert a music CD of choice.
You should see the track listings and information of the CD appear. Simply click on 'Rip', to start copying songs from the CD.