Any good, and free, wav to mp3 converter and/or cd ripper out there? I've been searching but been only coming up with shareware stuff.

Here you Go!

I use LAME with RazorLAME.

Open source CD ripper, encoder frontend, decoder frontend:
CDex

Freeware CD ripper, encoder frontend, decoder frontend:
Exact Audio Copy

The best mp3 encoder:
LAME, currently 3.97 Beta 2, don't use Alpha compiles they are for testing purposes only!

The best and easiest way to create an audio CD from encoded or decoded files:
Burrrn

Freeware easy to use encoder and decoder frontends:
Speek's Frontends

FREE--CD Ripper-works like a charm. (The author is French and you can find it at www.koyotstar.free.fr/indexEN.html) What I like about it is its ease of use a couple of clicks and the program even gets the tags from FreeDB.

Nothing beats LAME, it is hands down the worlds best MP3 encoder.
It is command line based, so you probably want to use it together with RazorLAME which is a frontend for it.

There are many MP3 encoders, but if you want the absolutely best, then LAME is what you should get.

However, you might also consider encoding it to Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) instead of MP3. Ogg Vorbis is in many ways very similiar to MP3, but it has greater audio quality, and greater compression which makes a Ogg Vorbis file at example 128 kbit/s sound much better than an MP3 file at 128 kbit/s.

http://www.vorbis.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis

yeah ogg does have better compression(except in some cases it can become larger than mp3). also it's gapless

Downloads for Ogg Vorbis software can be found here. Currently Oggenc2.8 using aoTuVb4.51 is being recommended on Hydrogenaudio.

That was the original reason why I switched to Ogg Vorbis as a lossy audio format.

Mediamonkey (Inu-Ya gave you link)
also i can say to you that ogg vorbis is much better! I use it about 3 months and it's great! Ogg @66 kbps is far better than 128 kbps (even 148 kbps) MP3! I use Ogg@~500 kbps (sometimes it's about 450 and sometimes abowe 500) and sound is magnificent! try it (MediaMonkey has extra good Ogg converter)

yeah but i doubt that converting mp3 to ogg will make it gapless since the mp3 isnt.

Yeah, JohnDemo's right; if anything, quality will diminish from converting. You can't get something from nothing.

Thanks guys!

Bulls**t!

You'd be better off going lossless; FLAC, WavPack, etc.

CDex with LAME

dbpoweramp 10 the last freeware version and Lame MP3 encoder.

@Andavari
your choice... Just to remind you: there is far more users with intergrated Sound card which is having poor sound quality (not poor but in comparison to SB live (very cheap) 24 bit... (i dont mean this new motherboards with SB live 7.1 and so on))! And OGG is taking so little space on your HDD and that is very good (because usual users (in serbia) have around 3000- 15000 songs in Mp3 (depending on HDD size but almost every teenager is having around 20 gb of music (now hdd-s are cheap so this number is expended!))!
Quality is excellent (when you convert Audio cd (original) to OGG at 500 kb/s) and i recommend this format (but people like mp3)

No it isn't a choice of mine. If you want to make claims of a 66 kbps .ogg being better than a 128 kbps .mp3 you're going to have to provide proof, which I already know doesn't exist.

Educate yourself by reading reputable audio forums.