Hi

reply #1
I would recommend Winamp. It is a free audio/video player that features a "media library" which can scan your computer for songs and videos, then allows you to search and arrange them. Check here for more info and some screenshots: http://www.winamp.com/player/product_overview.php

To download Winamp click here and choose to download the 'Full' package:
http://www.winamp.com/player/free.php

reply #2
Thanks Paul.

Musicmatch Jukebox says that it can rip audio CDs, would Winamp be able to that too?

By the way can you tell I've been reading up on the technical jargon "rip audio CDs" - impressive eh?

reply #3
Unfortunately with Winamp you have to buy the "Pro" version to be able to rip audio CD tracks to .mp3 audio files. You can rip to .wav audio files with Winamp but these files are very large.

.mp3 files are effectively compressed versions of .wav files (like Zip files, they compress larger files to make them smaller in size). They work by actually losing some of the sound from the music - though most is outside what the human ear can hear so you won't notice much (if any) difference in quality compared to the original song.
The big benefit is that .mp3 files can be around 10 times smaller than .wav files - so in theory you could store 10 times as many songs on your PC in this format, making it ideal when you want to rip lots of albums and songs to your PC.

There are several free programs which can rip audio to mp3 including Windows Media Player version 10 http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/mp10/default.aspx

In Media Player's Tools>Options menu you can specify your Rip Music settings (right-click anywhere on Media Player's title bars to access the Tools menu). I recommend you set it to use 'mp3' format with a quality of '192 Kbps'. This gives pretty good quality at a decent file size. You can insert a CD, tick/un-tick tracks to select particular ones and then click Rip Music to rip those songs to your PC.

Hope all this is useful to you

Paul

P.S. do you think the creators of CD technology would've been happy to know that decades later, millions of us would be doing nasty-sounding things like "ripping" and "burning" to their nice shiny discs every day? :)