Hi Zep, I went ahead and upgraded to mp10 for my system. It seems nice so I'll go with it thanks. Unfortunately I still can't get the songs onto my pos mp3 player, there must be something wrong with it is all I can figure. I am able to rip songs from my cd's fine but the whole transfering them thing just isn't working. I am going to try the mp3 player in another computer at work tomorrow and I'll go from there. Remember we've had this thing for a few years just sitting in a closet with how to speak german on it so its no big loss. I'll go get another simple yet fairly inexpensive model at w-mart to learn on. I'm not giving up on this because I'm tired of listening to the boring elevator music the local station plays here in the middle of nowhere. Thanks, Neal

Some information here at link provided. See if any helps or sheds light. In the mean time others may have an answer for you. Here is a link that might be useful: sansa

Audacity records digital audio information. If you're recording a sound sourced from a record, with the sound source connected to a PC, it's gone through a A to D conversion. Which is what my first comment today mentioned as a factor limiting quality. PC level sound converters are of low quality generally. A really good one all by itself costs hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Whether a sound is stored in analog form or in consumer digital source, at the point where it's inside a PC and "recordable", it's digital. Digital is digital, the original source doesn't matter as far as ways to record it. When you say "OP", are you talking about the conversation above from many years back? PS - there's nothing at all wrong with sound stored in digital form, per se. Most modern musical sound recordings are stored in that way. But at the recording studio level, the sound is lossless and is at VERY high bitrates and VERY high sample rates, much higher in both regards than anything available or playable at a consumer level. Playback of such recordings over appropriate equipment sounds nearly exactly the same as the sound was live.

If your cds will play in a regular household player, and the player does not say "mp3/cd-r/rw compatible" chances are your cds are formatted as regular cds not mp3 disks - does that sound right? Did you convert the files to be regular cd type files, or did you just burn the mp3 files to disk as is? Some car cd players won't play burned disks at all, most newer ones specify that they can; and what formats. I had a 99 VW Golf, and some played, some didn't but mostly it was ok but that was not so much by design. The disks you use make a difference, avoid heavy/dark dye/base layers, the more silver looking (like commercial cds) the better. Ipod or similar may have to be your workaround. The slightly reduced quality (mp3 is a lossy format) you get used to, and having the range of songs, random play and eliminating need to change cds probably make it worthwhile.