What max said and there’s also Exact Copy Audio ( http://www.exactaudiocopy.de)
The most common media-playing applications for Window Media Player and iTunes, both default to poor quality ripping settings. Click on the ‘RIP CD’ in Media Player 11 and it will hand over MP3 files encoded at a bitrate of 128Kb/sec. Suffice to say thatt the lower the bitrate, the greater the compression and the larger the amount of the original file or CD is disposed off in the process. While you can increase the rate at which WMP and iTunes rip, if you want full control over the process you need a dedicated ripping and encoding application as listed above.
Perhaps the best feauture of both applications is Accurate Rip. This is a small application that creates a checksum code for each of the music files you’ve ripped, and then compares them with a database to determine if your codes are identical to those created by other users ripping the same CD or file.
There endeth today’s lesson 😈