What's a decent cd ripping utility?

[St Leo]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
WHat's a good conversion utility, if I want to convert an MP3 from 160 or 192 to 128 bit?

Use CDex to go from MP3 to WAV and then from WAV to MP3. Like Asher says, this is generally bad for quality.

[Sikander]

I just leave them in WAV format. It saves a lot of trouble.

[St Leo]

Can you spare a hard drive for a poor student?

[self biased]

128k sounds like venom's ass after mexican night. i use 192k mp3. it's only marginally more space, and sounds worlds better.

[Al'Kimiya]

cdda-xtractor is a fine open source alternative, with wav/mp3/ogg support

mp3 quality differs very much depending on which encoder, encspot is a good utility to check mp3 quality

[Az]

Whenever I download, I TRY to get more than 128k, myself. It's rarely available, though.

Oh, and I use Nero Express. I like it.

[asleepathewheel]

Thanks for the help

I fixed my problem with the popping noises-I switched to my burner drive to transfer the tracks as well as switching some options around (variable bit rate, error correcting etc) using WMP9, works quite nicely.

[Whaleboy]

Easy cdda extractor (the shareware thing). I use 192 kb/s oggs. I tried mp3s and wma9s at that bitrate too, you can actually hear the difference on my (nice) speakers... oggs it is!

[pg]

Cdex is great. i use it along with VBR lame.

[optimus2861]

Another for CDex.

If you ever use Windows Media Player to do it, be sure to turn off the licensing "feature" before doing so. It's on by default.