It largely depends on exactly what you are doing. Are you trying to archive your CDs to have a copy forever? Or are you just wanting to have digital versions to listen to on your devices? Or do you want both?
In the archival case, it is indeed a good idea to keep a lossless copy, as you are doing. However, WAV is a very inefficient format, as it’s basically just a direct copy of the CD. The better choice would be FLAC. I recommend downloading CDex (and avoiding any additional programs it tries to install) to extract files to FLAC. Just go to the compression options and choose FLAC at the highest compression setting, then choose to save a compressed copy.
For the second case, saving as MP3 is probably the best option. Again, CDex will make this rather easy. You just need to go into the options and change the format to MP3. The default options should be sufficient unless you have a device that’s really old and won’t play the files, or that has so little space that you want smaller files at the cost of quality loss. (If so, let me know, and I can help you pick the best options.)
For the third case, doing both is actually fairly convenient. You just change the options and encode again.
That said, you already have some files already saved. Fortunately, CDex offers the ability to convert existing WAV files to other formats, too. Unfortunately, I’ve never done this before, and I’m not at my Windows computer to check you how to do this. But I’m pretty sure it’s rather straightforward. I would guess you can load a folder like you would a disk, and then convert all the files in that folder to either FLAC or MP3.
Anyways, CDex can be downloaded here.
As for Audacity: It’s great if you’re just handling individual files, or have any need to make some edits before you save. But for bulk ripping and converting, dedicated software is a lot better. CDex is also free software. Oh, and LAME already comes with it, not requiring a separate download.
