Free Audio Converter CS is a CD ripper, audio encoder and converter for various formats. It can produce MP3, MP4/M4A, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, Bonk and FLAC files.

With the rise of MP3s in this day and age everyone wants to get in on ripping their CDs to audio files. Unfortunately with many widespread tools, the quality of the MP3 is usually severly lacking. Thankfully there are some free and Open Source programs out there that produce quality sounding music for your computer and your iPod as well.

Free Audio Converter CS makes it easy to convert your audio CDs to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis files which you can use in your hardware player or with your favorite audio software. The program supports the CDDB/freedb online CD database and CDText and automatically writes song information to ID3V2 or Vorbis comment tags.

Free Audio Converter CS comes with several different presets for the LAME encoder. All of these just give different settings to the encoder with various qualities. The higher the setting (e.g. "Extreme") the more room the MP3s will take up on your hard drive but the better they will sound. I prefer to use the custom settings and set qualities individually. You can see those settings here. For now let's leave the preset on Standard. Hit ok and we can select which tracks we want to rip and encode.