I’ve got maybe 250 cds, I hardly listen to anything at all these days, but I can’t just give them away or sell them, so I’m copying them and maybe will end up selling them and burning them back to cds, and there’s the question. I’m using Windows Media Player and copying them in wma format. But I need to burn the new cds in mp3 format, or wav at least. What’s a good method for doing this?
There are a few things you could do.
A) You could use something like dBpowerAMP. It uses the Lame technology. It has a complete set of tools for ripping your CD’s nicely right into mp3 from the start.
B) You can also use this tool to convert your existing wma’s to Mp3. It’s a nice product and I usually burn at 320K which gives you on average between 6 and 15MB /file.
C) Last week I installed Windows Media Player 10. The install found the Lame drivers and now, I can use WMP to rip right to Mp3. Very handy. 
Make sure you install dBpowerAMP before you install the new WMP.
The program you’re looking for is called Cdex . Open-source, free Cd-ripping program that takes care of most of the details for you (labeling tracks, organizing, and so forth).
Don’t use WMA, as you’ll be locked into Microsoft’s proprietary format, and WMA is generally regarded as being one of the worst-sounding compression alogrithms. Stick with MP3, which is also somewhat proprietary, but nearly a universal standard.
The higher bit rate you can use for encoding, the better your music will sound, at the cost of increased storage space requirements.
I totally agree with jweb. DO NOT rip them into WMA. You might as well give all your CDs to Microsoft if you’re going to do that.
Ripping cds for the possible purpose of selling them later sounds shady at best, and for that reason I’m locking this thread.
Sorry.