I'd be surprised if it's Musicmatch causing your awful noises. As you can see from my previous post most of my 2000+ songs have been encoded with Musicmatch and there's only one track which had a brief "squeak" at the start of the track which wasn't present in the intermediate WAV file. So I'd suspect something else is wrong with your setup / procedure. Generally I've been very impressed with the speed & quality of Musicmatch.

beaker
32 gig (various colours)