Almost all computer audio software now includes the capability to rip CD's and save audio files in MP3 (or other) format. Winamp, Itunes, Windows Media Player and many others have built-in processes to accomplish this. Most will save the music in album form, complete with artwork and other info. You may then copy the MP3 files to your portable MP3 player or create playlists on your computer.

Unfortunately, no. Any CD drive can play audio CD's, that's true but the term "ripping" is mostly used to refer to Digital Audio Extraction (i.e. extracting the audio data digitally to the computer, rather than converting it to analogue data in the drive and playing it through the sound card directly, which is what happens when you "play" an audio CD on your computer drive). Not all CD drives support Digital Audio Extraction and even for those that do support it, the speed and reliability vary enormously from drive to drive. If your drive absolutely won't do DAE, then you can fall back on "analogue ripping" (i.e. just playing the CD and then recording the analogue signal back through your sound card) but the results won't be as good as a proper digital rip. MusicMatch JukeBox supports analogue recording from CD's, for example, or you can just play the CD and then record using a WAV recording program such as GoldWave.

Well, if you have Roxio's Easy CD Creator, it has a nice little option in it (under "System Tests") for testing your drive to see if it performs DAE, and if so, at what speed. Also other ripper programs, such as CDEX and Exact Audio Copy, give various diagnostic messages if there are problems with the ripping process.

If you're using Roxio, head on over to their official site and download a small program entitled "aspichk.exe", which should be available in the Download portion of their website. This program will check on your installation and report back. If this program identifies errors or version mismatches in your ASPI installation, you may need to reinstall these programs to get your burner working properly. The driver files themselves are also available from Roxio's website.

Update: Apparently Roxio's website does not have the aspi layer. It can be obtained from Adaptec's site: Adaptec
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Thanks to Frosty for the updated info.

If you're using Digital Audio Extraction (which is what is usually meant by "ripping"), then I don't believe anything "controls the volume". You are simply taking the digital PCM data from the audio CD and transferring it to digital PCM data in a WAV file on your PC (well, you may also be doing MP3 encoding, but that's actually a second step). The "volume" is simply a direct transfer of the sample amplitude from the CD.