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I've been playing with Sound Forge, a software package for professional digital audio editing and mastering. I had used it years ago, but I hadn't tried any of the recent versions after Sony bought it from Sound Foundry. I was glad to see it still has the great no-nonse interface and powerful features that made it popular.

I recently subscribed to Yahoo's Music Unlimited service. For a small yearly fee you can download as many songs as you'd like from the catalog of over 1 million titles, not bad. Even thought their music engine (itunes-like) is still in beta, it compares positively to other services. You can download songs to your local drive, but they encrypted using MS WMA's DRM technology.

What you can do, with Sound Forge or other much simpler Shareware tools, is perform an D/A/D conversion using your soundcard Stereo Mix as the output. No cables are required. This generates a WAV file (you have to be careful to adjust the volumes properly and avoid clipping), which you can turn into an MP3 just as easily (I recommend using LAME as your Encoder, it's the most accurate.) A freeware tool like dbPowerAMP will do that for example.

There you go. That's my geek talk for the day