Do NOT Buy Nero 7 Premium Burning Suite

MP3 support. One of the big complaints in Media Player for Windows XP (MPXP) and Windows Media Player 9 Series was that Microsoft seemed to be pushing their own Windows Media formats over existing rival formats that had already penetrated the market. The big example here is MP3: Microsoft has always allowed users to play back songs encoded in this format but never offered a way for users to rip music in MP3 out of the box; instead you would have to purchase a $9.99 plug-in, from one of a few partners, which added this capability. Meanwhile, every other music player on the planet supports this functionality out of the box

Well, in WMP 10 the wait is finally over, though it has sort of a anticlimactic ring to it: You can now rip music to MP3 format from WMP 10 directly, without needing an add-on (Figure). There's just one problem: Microsoft's MP3 encoder only supports 128, 192, 256, and 320 Kbps MP3 ripping. Because I prefer to rip songs to 160 Kbps MP3 format, I still need to install a third party MP3 encoder. Hey, it's better than nothing, and it's certainly better than the crippled MP3 ripping in RealPlayer 10.5 Plus.

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