It's reportedly excellent. From what I've read, as long as you get your level settings right then you would truely be hard pressed to distinguish the difference between an MP3 created this way versus ripping it right from a CD. The only downside to this method is you have to play the entire song in order to encode it, but if you just batch them and let them run overnight then it's no big deal. Plus these tools automatically handle the ID3 song tags for you. Of course I wouldn't know from personal experience

This thread shows a long history of various methods that have been tried and plugged to get around the DRM (digital rights management) issues - http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=78454 . Time will tell if a lasting hack will be developed that permits the direct conversion of a protected WMA file to an unprotected MP3.

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