I just bought a new MP3 player (Sanyo DMC520). It did not come with any audio software - instead one is supposed to drag the mp3/wma files from windows explorer to the device. I would like to use my fairly old computer with Win98 and about 700Mb free hard-drive space for this task, so obviously ripping to the harddrive is a step I would like to avoid. What is the best app that can rip mp3/wma directly from an audio CD to a USB device using the harddrive only as cache/buffer and has some playlist management features as well? I have been using MediaPlayer 7.1 but it seems to require a 2-step process where you first create a playlist on the HD and then sync it to the device. I have now discovered Easy CD-DA Extractor which seems to do a good job without using the hard-drive resources, but unfortunately with Win98 I have difficulties creating .wma files: When I open ECDE a warning pops up that the windows media codecs are not installed. I have installed the wma 8 codecs, as well as the codecs available on the microsoft site for Win 98. None of those seem to help - is there anything else I can do to use ECDE for .wma on this machine?
Use a program called Exact Audio Copy. It will create great sounding MP3's while using little Hard drive space as possible. Once they've been ripped just transfer them to your player and delete them from tyour pc. Here is the guide for EAC http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/mydeneaclame.cfm
