Any "copying," including ripping a CD you own, transcoding an audio cassette you own, etc. is, strictly speaking, in violation of copyright.
Maybe. Strictly speaking the laws are fuzzy enough that it's not always clear what's in violation, and what's not.
In the US you have "Fair Use" which can allow an individual to do "things" with the copyrighted work that have not been expressly permitted to them by way of a license. [...] The fair use concept doesn't expressly cover making digital copies of your analog recordings (format shifting).
It also doesn't expressly cover time-shifting, either, but in Universal vs. Sony, the Supreme Court declared such behaviour as non-infringing. In a way, that decision could also be taken to mean that format shifting is also legal, since the act of time-shifting can only be done by format shifting -- copying television/cable signals onto a physical medium for later playback.
(Naturally, I am not a lawyer, and that's not legal advice.)
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