Windows media player 10

EAC with Accurip is the gold standard. There are numerous threads on this topic.

Yes, it offers a lossless format. Open Media player, click on tools, options and then click on the tab "Rip music". Look at the pull down menu for "rip settings". Here you will find 4 choices with one being Windows Lossless. I do not check the 3 options below this tab. Below this, you will find an 'Audio Quality" slider option, I select the Best Quality.

The sound quality is as good or better than playing from a CD player. I did listening test and I'm very happy with this.

I'm also using a Linksys wireless Media Center extender that is connected to my sound system. I have put all my CD's into the PC on an external 300 gig hard drive, have 5000 of my favorite songs and still have 70% free space on the hard drive. I have backed up the ripped music on the main PC, just in case the external would ever fail. My CD's are now all available from a remote control with many options of playlist, artists, song, ect. I'm using Windows XP Media Center 2005 software on my main PC.

This is what I use but there are also other good methods of getting your ripped music to your system.

The widows media player #10 uses the WMA lossless system for ripping. According to the experts it is about 97 or 98% as good as the EAC system. If the new user of EAC is not computer savvy EAC can be a pain in the butt.

Charlie

Hmm... People seem to be conflating two concepts... EAC is a ripper... It just takes what is on a CD and renders it into WAV files (basically, straight PCM data in a wrapper) on your computer, and with "secure" mode set, it does it very, very well. It has a hook in it that allow you to specify an encoder that will take those WAV files and compress them to create files of a different variety--mp3, Apple Lossless, whatever.

I think you have to differentiate between the ripping function and the format conversion/compression function. WMP10 may be set up to combine those functions, but its still two discrete functions. You can separate the two functions as well--you could use EAC if you are concerned, and then separately change the WAV files into WMA Lossless files. (The only issue there being whether you will preserve track/artist/etc information in the transformation; I suspect there is a way of calling a WMA Lossless converter from EAC that will preserve the data--that is what I do with iTunes, its automatically called from EAC.)