I just got a laptop and am looking for a free software to burn my normal CD's together on 1 CD in MP3 format.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.  Thanks.

Word on the street from the little birdie is that Roxio Easy CD Creator and Nero software can be had fairly easily on the internets.

Search of download.com

Window Media Player, Real player.

First you need "ripping" software to copy the CDA files properly onto your hard drive as .wav files, and then you need MP3 encoding program to generate MP3's of them. Some programs can do both automatically. I searched on SourceForge, which is free/open-source software, and found this page for CD-DA X-Tractor, that says it can automatically do MP3 conversions with BladeEnc or LameEnc (two MP3 encoder programs). You might need to download one of those other programs, but they are free as well.
sourceforge.net/projects/xtractor/

.....

As far as I know, a CD in "mp3 format" is just a "data" CD with mp3 files on it.
You can do that with WindowsXP, it will burn plain data CD's. You don't even specificvally need to use Windows Media Player, just the regular XP CD-burning wizard thing can do it.

Some car and home-stereo players have limitations onhow many subdirectories they can page into (early MP3-CD players could only play MP3's in the root directory of the CD) so I would avoid going deeper than two or three directories myself.
www.cdrfaq.org/faq03.html#S3-27
The above link says to burn in "ISO-9660 format with 8+3 filenames, and ought to use 128Kbps and "plain" stereo for broadest compatibility".
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Quoted: First you need "ripping" software to copy the CDA files properly onto your hard drive as .wav files, and then you need MP3 encoding program to generate MP3's of them. Some programs can do both automatically. I searched on SourceForge, which is free/open-source software, and found this page for CD-DA X-Tractor, that says it can automatically do MP3 conversions with BladeEnc or LameEnc (two MP3 encoder programs). You might need to download one of those other programs, but they are free as well. sourceforge.net/projects/xtractor/

FWIW, iTunes can extract the audio from a CD and encode it into .mp3 format with the click of a button or two.  By default it'll encode files as .aac for use on an iPod, but you can configure it to encode as .mp3s.

Is there any free ware the lets you convert .wma to .mp3? My girlfriend has downloaded many songs off Walmart.com, but they are .wma format and can't make an .mp3 cd with that.

all you need is Windows Media Player

Exact Audio Copy for ripping and the Winlame encoder for processing.    

Google it.  

Quoted: FWIW, iTunes can extract the audio from a CD and encode it into .mp3 format with the click of a button or two.  By default it'll encode files as .aac for use on an iPod, but you can configure it to encode as .mp3s.

Quicktime used to be a very lightweight media player, but bundled with iTunes (as it is) it is both spyware and adware in itself now.

If you update Quicktime, it installs iTunes automatically, and the iTunes install sets two processes (ituneshelper.exe and ipodservice.exe) to run all the time, if you want or need them or not. You have to go into computer management and set them to manual there after the install.

It's already known that iTunes relays whatever music info it finds to Apple's data servers, and displays advertisements based on what it finds on your PC.
...so I say....
If Apple wants to watch what I do with my PC, they can pay me cold hard cash for the priviledge. I never recommended iTunes for anything before, but I certainly won't from now on.
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Quoted: all you need is Windows Media Player

+1

I rip CDs onto the computer with MP, and can burn them back as MP3 with MP as well. There might be some fancier things out there, but MP is already in the computer, and it's free.