> [...] I want to rip some CDs.  The only problem is that my player
> doesn't have digital ripping capability or whatever is normally
> needed.  None of the ripping programs that I've tried work with it.

Well, at least, if it has that capability, none of those know how to
invoke it. :-)

> Can I rip CDs anyways, somehow (maybe with sox)?

Unlikely.  If you'll bear with me for a little explanation, maybe
you'll see why I say that.

CDs have, pretty fundamentally, a 2352-byte sector size.  This is not
quite all the information the disc has on it; there is subchannel info,
the TOC stuff, and such, but for our purposes here we can ignore that.

For audio tracks, the whole 2352-byte block is used for data.  (This is
the "frame" 75 of which are played per second.  2352*75 = 44100
(samples/sec) * 2 (channels/sample) * 2 (bytes/channel).)

For data tracks, this is 2048 bytes of data, with the remaining bits
being used for error correction.  (I don't know whether the data
appears verbatim somewhere in there; some error-correcting codes do
have the data bits appearing unchanged in the output, some don't, and I
don't know which data CDs use.)

To rip audio tracks, you need a drive that is willing to take the
2352-byte sectors from audio tracks and pass them back to the host as
2352-byte data blobs.  Some drives simply are not willing to do this,
at all (though those are rare these days).  It sounds as though you may
be stuck with one of those.  But it's not certain, because how you get
a drive to do this varies from drive to drive - there is not nearly as
much standardization here as one might wish.  Thus, your drive may be
capable of it, but just use a method that none of the ripping programs
you tried know about.

But from a practical point of view, its being capable of ripping but
nobody knowing how amounts to much the same thing as its being
incapable of ripping - which is why I started out saying "unlikely".

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