You could technically store all your music as sound waves, but that requires 25MB+ per song. I use CDex to rip my music directly from the CD (up to 320kbps bitrate - about 8MB for a song - I think that's the highest bitrate that MP3 does). Unless you're looking to plug your computer into a home theatre system (or have too much storage space like yours truly ^_^), 192kbps is sufficient for compressed audio.
I really don't like any integrated ripping tools like WMP, because the control is taken away from the user.
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Why don't most other CD burning software have an option like that?
Zuh? When you record an audio CD, you either:
~ Are duplicating a CD directly, which results in no loss of quality when compared to the original
~ Or using compressed audio files, which are decompressed and then written to the disc with certain parts missing. The catch is that the parts missing are hardly noticed. I forget which parts are removed, but I'm sure there's info out there on how and what the MP3 algorithms remove to reduce the size.
Imation is my favourite brand for CDRs, but TDK also do a good disc. I have a spindle of 60 TDK Metallics to use at some stage