What do I have to use to rip commercially produced Audio Cd's in to Mp3 format on my computer. I have Mandreava LE 2005 (download edition) none of the software that came with it can encode in to mp3

Of course it can. You may need to do a little tweaking, and you very likely need to get an mp3 codec in place. Check out Grip, Lame, K3B, etc. This ain't Windows. Freedom requires a little extra work, ... but it's fun.

grip is a good cdripper for gnome kaudiocreator for kde or ripperX. you need lame and cdparanoia mabye cdda2wav check the cds you might have some of those progs.

I agree. I use Grip to rip my audio CD's and it's easy to use. Just make sure you configure it to convert to MP3 since it'll do .ogg by default, at least for me!

Just install grip software followed by lame and make sure encoder is on mp3 when it rips.

d-1

... dolphans1 surely means lame ... You can rip either with Grip or with K3b, but I don't remember the commands to pass in K3b, will look up that if you want ...

Yes exactly Hans, it was a typo and I made correction, thanks for pointing that out.

d-1

Cant get grip to allow me to use lame tho kaudiocreator will. How can I adjust bitrate when using Kaudiokreator I cannot find the option.

If I want to use ripper X , it can find CD. I forced Check of drives (ignore /dev/cdrom) box but still no go. Is there a file I can edit to get it to use /dev/hdc

lame --help
in a command line. You should get the version number and a little help for Lame. If you get "bash: lame: command not found" you didn't install Lame correctly (you MUST install it, it doesn't come prebundled, at least not in the Community Version of Mandriva). Lame is found on plf, to configure it, follow instructions on this link (in step 2, choose a server for at least the two last entries), then you can install via the Control Center:
http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/

Hope this helps.

Go to "Configure KAudioCreator" -> "Encoder". Select "lame" and press the "configure" button. There you can change all the settings in the section "command line".

WARNING: Only mess around here if you know what you are doing and know the lame commands well.

Now, why do you want to change the bitrate? Changing this will unlikely bring you neither big change in file size, neither better quality (especialy if you plan using 128kbit/sec, it will get worse). But well, people always insist in controlling the bitrate setting for Lame ...

You can change the "--preset standard" part to either "--preset medium/extreme/insane" (choose only one of the tree).

But you want CBR? Sure? OK, type in a command line prompt (NOT in the KAudioCreator menu!!!)
lame --longhelp
read it all and answer yourself if you know what all this stuff is for. OK, see why it's no good idea to mess around to much? If you want do that, you should know what all this fancy stuff is for, which algorithm is controlled, what each switch is good for. If you still really think you need to use CBR (why do people insist on this?) while you have no idea of the above you can replace the "--preset standard" part by "-q 2 -b 192" with the last number being the bitrate.

Nice Weekend

OH! I forgot: K3b (burning app) now has a nice GUI for controlling lame. It was introduced in the 0.12 series. You may use this. If you use KDE it should be around somewhere ...