The second way of obtaining MP3 files for you to listen to digital music is by "ripping" tracks from your every-day audio CD. This method might be the most obvious, but it certainly isn't the easiest--and most reliable--to do. That's why I'm not going to give you specific steps to how to do it, but instead, give you some sort of guideline for you to go with if you want to use this method. I would personally just opt for the other method of downloading from Napster and just forget about this method unless 1) you're using a very slow modem connection or 2) the song you're looking for is very rare and you can't find it on Napster.

Before you try this method, you must have a CD-ROM drive installed in the computer, and it must support DAE (Digital Audio Extraction). Usually, any CD-ROM that is 24X or faster should support that. You can still try this method if your CD-ROM drive doesn't support DAE, but chances are, the audio will have cracks in it.

The program that I recommend is called Audiograbber. It is the easiest CD ripper that I've ever used, but it requires that you spend $25 to register to get full functionality from it. Another good program that I would recommend is Easy CD-DA Extractor. It is also very easy to use, although not as easy as Audiograbber. The upside to Easy CD-DA Extractor is that it doesn't require you to register the software, saving you a couple of bucks. Both of these programs will rip tracks from CDs and convert them directly to MP3 files. Download them, install them, run them, and try them out. It's pretty straight forward, simply select the tracks that you want to extract, press a button, make sure to specify where and how to save the file and to tell the program to save it as a MP3 file, click another button, wait a few minutes and you're done. See? Wasn't that easy? If you're totally confused by the guidelines stated above, don't worry, it's not a very easy process and requires that you have some advanced knowledge of computers and the MP3 compression format. That's why I suggest that you just stick with the other method of downloading it from Napster.

On to: Conclusion