[K.B.]

If you want something easy to configure and use, Audiograbber will do the trick. EAC is for ripping an error free recording. How picky are you? EAC will try to read at 10x or so and continue down to 4x, 2x, 1x, .4x .1x. If your cd's are scratched up - forget about it. CDEX is easy(and free) to use, but does not do much errorchecking compared to EAC.

Lame codec will do VBR but be careful with the latest beta versions. VBR will vary the bitrate from 128k to 192k to 320k depending on the complexity of the music. I was advised to do "alt preset standard" to pass a defined set of presets to the Lame encoder, for optimal playback. It takes slightly more room at the higher bitrates but not by much. A 33MB song compresses to about 2.9MB at 128k or 3.1MB on a VBR.

CDDB and/or Freedb will get all of the Artists names/songs etc from on line databases for you. That is the best part of this, somebody else has already typed out all of the info. Occasionally they will name something incorrectly like (CD2) instead of (Disk2)

If you want about 1000 different things to set for a player/database program check into foobar2000. You have to enjoy dealing with data to use that program. But it does allow you to do about anything you want with the data.

KB