There are a few things to consider when you plan to convert your audio CD collection to a digital format. There's error correction for one thing, especially if your CDs have been around for long and have marks and scratches on the surface. If you shopped around and tried a few CD rippers, you know by now that they all come up with different results: some have lousy jitter control, others blatantly refuse to rip a damaged track, others yet copy all the mistakes to the MP3 file, making it useless. Try Exact Audio Copy and see the difference.
     Exact Audio Copy is a CD ripper that aims for perfect accuracy when grabbing audio tracks from CDs. When first running the tool, you can pick the CD-ROM drive and install the Lame MP3 coder to enable ripping directly to MP3 files. The program checks the damaged bits again and again to ensure it sound right in the grabbed file. It also lets you test the tracks beforehand and shows you a report on each track, so that you know what to expect. The program is quite slow in grabbing tracks, but if you have a particularly battered CD, it is definitely worth the time and trouble.
     There's also an option of making an image of an audio CD so that you could copy it later to a CD-R. It, as most CD rippers have, makes use of the free CDDB to get titles and artist names for each CD right. Download this free grabber today and check it out yourself.