This process is know as ripping or digital audio extraction and reffers to copying the audio or video data from one media form, such as DVD, HD DVD, Blu-ray or CD, to a hard disk.

To conserve storage space, the copied data is usually encoded in a compressed format such as MP3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis for audio, or MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD for video.

There are a lot of programs on the Internet that can rip a CD to mp3. Here are some of them:

FreeRIP is a Windows application that lets you save audio CD tracks to Wav, MP3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis or FLAC audio files.

Audiograbber is a very flexible and configurable program and easy to understand.