>Why bother with pesky cd ripper tools?

Becuase 'ripping' is: "Compact Disc Digital Audio (CDDA) extraction tool, commonly known on the net as a 'ripper'" see http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html#cdparanoia

If you try and use DD to rip audio cd's, it will just error and you get nothing.

It does work good for data CD's though. Here is a little script I wrote to mount them:

# Makes a dir (uses the iso image name), and mounts the image under it.
fname=`basename $1 .iso`
mkdir $fname
mount $1 -r -t iso9660 -o loop $fname
mount