Another free app is
Musicmatch. The key is to use a high bitrate to preserve the sound quality. Many would argue for you to look into "lossless" ripping. I personally didn't want to eat up that much space. However, there are many that are adament that you can tell the difference in audio quality.
Good luck. It's a long process.
FYI...I think that
Winamp does ripping, as well. In fact, I think that the newest Windows Media Player supports mp3 ripping. You may want to look around
ZDNet to see what the most popular programs are right now for ripping.