You might already know that MP3 is a lossy format right? Portions of the original song get thrown away, yes.
Storage capacity is no longer a problem. Start compressing your music to a lossless format that guarantees to be an exact copy of the original source, bit by bit. For example, consider FLAC, a free lossless audio codec.
To rip music tracks I use Exact Audio Copy and configure it with FLAC options. For playback I prefer Winamp but you can use Windows Media Player or iTunes.
FLAC options in EAC
Additional Command-Line Options: -6 -V -T “ARTIST=%a” -T “TITLE=%t” -T “ALBUM=%g” -T “DATE=%y” -T “TRACKNUMBER=%n” -T “GENRE=%m” -T “COMMENT=%e” %s -o %d
If you ever want to transcode from FLAC to MP3 or any other media format, try MediaCoder.
Music download services like Amazon or iTunes should start selling lossless format media, just like Merge Records does.
Happy encoding.