first off kudos to you for using eac and lame, as they are the best ripper and best encoder there is. if you are wondering if you can burn mp3 files to a disc and play them in a regular audio CD player, that depends on how you burn them. if you burn them as a data cdrom, and the files stay as mp3 files, then no. you need a audio CD player that can read mp3 discs. you can however create and audio cd using any burning app out there, such as nero. but if you are going to compress your ripped CD to mp3, then decode it back to an uncompressed PCM format for audio CD (the burning program does this for you) then you might as well just rip your CDs into wave format with EAC, not mp3. then you won't lose any quality.