There are a lot of ripping programs around.
You could rip with Windows Media Player–insert a CD, click Burn and look for the Rip Settings tab at the top center; change it from Windows Media Audio to mp3 at a good bitrate.
You could also use iTunes. You have to poke around Edit/Preferences/Settings/Advanced and change it from ripping to mp4 (iPod) to mp3 and choose a bitrate–you can set it as a new default. It also helps, after you rip something in iTunes, to run it through mp3tag to make it friendlier for Fuze.
A good thing about iTunes and WMP is that they download the most accurate tags, using the (commercial) CDDB database. Other rippers often use the user-generated FreeDB, which can be less accurate. However, they all have their goofy aspects.
For instance, iTunes makes artist folders with album subfolders. And CDDB’s tags go haywire with hip-hop albums: Kanye West featuring Jay-Z is one artist folder, Kanye West featuring Chief Keef is another artist folder, etc. Rip a hip-hop album and you get a bunch of artist folders with the album title as a subfolder–and one song in each.
Meanwhile, the true sound connoisseurs like Foobar2000; it uses a tag database called Musicbrainz, which is also user-generated.
The best way to tag is as a two-step process with mp3tag. Rip with iTunes/WMP/Foobar and then fix it for the Fuze with mp3tag.
Install mp3tag. When you install, let it add itself to context menus (an option while installing).
Open mp3tag and in Tools/Options/Tags/Mpeg make the Write option ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1.
(iTunes, at least my older version, makes ID3v2.2. I forget what version WMP uses. ISO-8859-1 is Windows character encoding–Apple uses UTF characters, less Fuze-friendly.)
Anyway, rip the CD. Right-click on the resulting folder, open it with mp3tag, make sure the tracks are displayed 1-whatever from top to bottom (you can click the Track column header). Highlight them and click Tools, Auto-numbering Wizard, and choose leading zeroes–which makes the track numbers 01, 02, 03 instead of iTunes’s 1/12, 2/12 etc. It will rewrite the tags in the ID3 version you chose.
And if you have a hip-hop album that’s been scattered, you can highlight all the Kanye West and Kanye West featuring folders, have mp3tag open them all at once, and put the album back together again using the track number column header. Make the artist Kanye West, type the featuring in with the song title.
