best free software for converting cd to mp3

[Dan B]

WAVs don't have "tags" describing artist, title, album etc which a lot of players rely on

There are other lossless formats available which do: FLAC is free in the GNU/hippy sense, there's also "WMA lossless" and an Apple offering. Typically these offer some compression but not as much as MP3 does

The other thing to bear in mind is that terabyte drives on the desktop are cheap, but storage on hardware mp3 playing devices (ipods and phones and stuff) is still a bit pricier, so you might want to compress lower-quality files for those applications

 

[Dan B]

Also, I don't know about EAC specifically, but one possible problem with ripping CDs in the "normal" way is that the drive doesn't like to do as much error checking for audio applications (or lies about what it reads) as it would for digital data, so on a scratched CD you can still end up with skips or gaps in the ripped output. cdparanoia (and, I would guess) EAC will counteract this using by doing clever low-level magic to make the drive work harder and retry the bits it didn't get first time round

 

[2Loose]

Uh oh... I can see where this going - dive for cover everyone

Dare I bite on the posh cables for digital music thing?...nah, too obvious.

 

[Soltydog]

Thanks for all the replies, but some have started going way over my head
Didn't realise media player did it & that worked fine for me. Cheers