I had to jump in on this post. When I first got my empeg all I used to encode my cd's was music match, and I usualy encoded at 192kbps. I didn't know what all the hipe was about with eac and lame until I downloaded and used it. Yes eac and lame is slower but thats because it does such a great job. As we speak I am re ripping all my cd's (I hate to say how many) the difference from music match to eac is just no comparison. Even at the highest quality setting of music match just stinks compared to eac and lame. Oh and eac was just trying to download info for your cd from the net it has no spyware or anything like that.