I'm trying to remember which version of Windows it was that had Media Player default to playing audio CDs digitally. ME? 2000? XP?

I seem to recall this default was troublesome on some low-spec systems because the drives and/or IDE bus were too slow to handle it, and you'd get skipping. So you had people changing the setting in the Media Player preferences, only to find their drive didn't have the analog audio hooked up to their sound card! 😁

I think Windows 98 SE and Windows 2000 both allowed digital transfer of audio tracks from IDE optical drives.

Both IDE and SATA can transfer audio digitally, if not by the operating system then by a player/ripper program.

But it wasn't until windows started to make it the default method that the CD drive makers actually put effort into making it return accurately positioned samples.