You're going to hate me, I used iTunes for ripping back in the windows XP days. It was the first program I met that would recognize titles and get album art. I used iTunes to manage my collection as well.
I don't know if I ever used iTunes to rip music but I did buy an iPod in 2005 so I used iTunes for that for a while. I ran into a bug with it though where it would fuck up the song database on my iPod and half the songs showed up on the iPod as unknown, everything was fine in iTunes. Found out pretty quickly after I discovered that that Winamp could handle loading music into an iPod and never had the problem again.
There's a good mod for it now that replaces the hard drive with an adapter for two SD cards, and it would let you put a shit ton of storage on it. If you've got some spare cash and patience I'd definitely recommend it.
Lol I'd hit the library on my way home in high school, get a bunch of CDs rip, return the next day and leave with a new batch... The antitheft sticker made the discs unbalanced, so I ended up RMAing my drive three times in 4 months, before the store just gave me my money back and canceled the sale.
At the time ripping library CDs was legal, so I got like 25 albums each week, 4 weeks a months and 4 months total, so about 400 albums, legally (but ethically? No) for free.