One of the best rippers is EAC. It main claim to fame is that it does the best job of extracting the music off the CD. Most rippers do not retry if a error occurs in the extraction process. EAC can generate all the common compression formats including FLAC. MP3 is not the way to go, it just sounds bad. Better to convert into a FLAC and then if want to transfer music onto a MP3 portable device use a transcoder to convert FLAC to MP3.

EAC only downside is that it runs best under Microsoft Windows.

S. Kench