How do you rip your music?

I've used itunes and freerip to rip cds and encode to mp3. While both work fine, music that's been ripped sounds a lot quieter than music downloaded from p2p on the same volume setting on my ipod. Anyone else having this happen? What are you using to rip your cds?

WinAmp.

I refuse to use itunes or anything DRM-restricted.

Some CDs are mastered differently and can sound quieter, but that's likely not your problem. It could be that the idv2 tag of the downloaded files has the volume adjustment bumped up.

If you separate the processes of extracting to .wav (raw pcm) and .mp3 (compressed/sliced) you can use a front end for Lame, which is a very mature encoding program which lets you scale the volume up during the encoding process. Just encode your ripped .wav's yourself. Granted this is a lot more work, and it sucks.

Don't know what else to tell you.

That was actually what I suspected, I'm just not an audio geek and I didn't want to spend a lot of time googling it :)

Thanks all, will definitely give lame/winamp a shot.

2nd'd for Winamp