Hi Ozrookie ;-)
There are loads of programs for ripping/converting to mp3,I use altomp3 maker This let's you choose which bitrate you want,It's a great little program and has served me well for a long time,You can download a demo here.
http://www.yuansoft.com/
Hi ozrookie
I was asking myself the same question tonight. I searched the boards (cd to mp3) and found this gem
http://cd-rw.org/articles/archive/mydeneaclame.cfm and I discovered a program called Exact Audio Copy found here http://cd-rw.org/software/audio_software/cd-da_extractors/exact_audio_copy.cfm I tried the program tonight on 5 of my kids well used cds and I was impressed. I am ready for my next project as I just completed backing up all my kids movies. I now can backup all their music and make a couple of new discs for traveling this summer
I hope this helps
www.acoustica.com
(they have a program which i had a trial of.Beconnected to the net,put your disc in the drive once the software is running,and it does an automatic search of your disc and provides all the tags for the songs.Saves a lot of time, you ever tried to type a couple 1000 song titles)
try the above sites got some very good trial programs for you to try before you consider buying
EAC + Lame, as said before. There are many other free rippers like CDex, Audiograbber, even some audio players like winamp or foobar2000 (with plugins) can be "abused" to rip + encode.
