So I buy the MP3 player for my car and just come to realize that I have nothing to rip MP3's off of my cd's and most of my music files are the damn windows wma files...

... so I need a suggestion on a good program to rip MP3's off of cd's, preferrably a free program :p

MusicMatch Jukebox (http://www.musicmatch.com/download/plus/jukebox_intro.htm?os=pc&mode=input&BTD=1&DID=999994654) is free and works OK.

I heard good things about CDex (http://www.cdex.n3.net/) too.

I personally use Easy CD-DA Extractor - but that's not free :D

Go to doom9 (http://doom9.org) and get everything you need. I personally use Exact Audio Copy to rip CDs to WAV and then have it start up LAME sessions for the MP3 encoding. I'd also suggest trying Variable Bit Rate (VBR) encoding to help keep filesizes down. I usually range from 128 to 320 with VBR and q=0, but then I'm trying to keep a higher quality. You could go down to 128 or range around there and get more songs on a single CD.

AudioGrabber (http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/) is an EXCELLENT ripper that supports just about every file format you can imagine including MP3, MP3 VBR (LAME), OGG Vorbis, WMA, CDG (karaoke) and more.

It is extremely fast and does ripping and encoding on-the-fly as fast as your drive can read the disc. It supports freedb/CDDB (fills in artist and track information for you), supports ID3 V1 and V2, volume normalization, track chopping, multi-artist CDs and plenty other features I've left out.

The best part is that it only costs $20 and includes future updates. There's also a demo that lets you grab 1/2 the tracks on your CD to see if you like the program. I've used it for a couple of years now and it just keeps getting better.

Check out their online tour (http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/maintour.html) for more information.

use iTunes it's available for Mac and Windows and very easy to use, and it's free, you can do any quality mp3

Yes, iTunes is excellent. It's great for managing/playing your MP3s as well. Plus you get access to the online music store, which makes it very convenient to add music (and legal too).

I ripped my entire library to MP3 and rarely pull my cds out anymore. I dug some out of the closet when I got my RX-8, cause I haven't figured out a good way to hook up my iPod to the car yet. I'm holding my breath for an adapter to jack into the CD changer, so that I can control the iPod music with the steering wheel.

Wahoo!

I recommend iTunes as well. It's great for organizing playing and sharing (over the local subnet) your music. I rip everything to 128Kb AAC (which sounds better than MP3 and plays on my iPod.) I can then burn playlists as MP3 or audio CDs and they still sound fine in the car.

I have to go another direction than most here and recommend CDex (as mentioned by Tamas). If you search the forum for CDex, you should find an earlier post of mine describing the features. The reason I prefer it, however, is because it is very small and does not have all of the extra stuff I don't need (music librarian, etc.). If you need that stuff, then yeah go with the other recommendations, but if you like a smaller footprint like me, then try CDex.

thanks for the responses... I downloaded the iTunes and it works great! :cool:

ok... 2 more questions

What kind of id3 tags does the MP3 player support??

Is there any program out there that converts wma files to mp3's???

Originally posted by pr0ber
What kind of id3 tags does the MP3 player support??It recognises ID3v1 only, though it is unaffected by the presence of ID3v2 tags.