Hello everyone, I'm a long time reader, first time poster so far all I had to do is search the forum and my questions were unswered. I guess the time has come for me to finally ask something myself.

I'm planning on extracting some of the CD's I have into wav for some experiments, and I get a choice of using Microsoft Sound Mapper, or SBLive! Audio [E800] thing that I presume came with my sound card which is SB Live! 5.1. Now I never heard MS being praised for their work with WAV format, but then again I never heard Creative praised for it either. Also considering that Sound card is not involved in the CD extraction I don't see the advantage of using something by it's manufacturer. So can somebody enlighten me or give me a link to some explanations/directions as for which one I should choose to do the job?

And while we at it I can also choose one of them for playback, same question as above applies

Oh yeah, I thought about putting it into Other Codecs section of the forum, but then I thought that General is a bit more appropriate. Move it if need be.

Why do you need either of the mentioned things to extract your CD? Did you read about EAC?

well as I said I'm doing an experiment, I did extract with EAC and CDex, but I also have SonicFoundry and I'm trying to excract with it too, however it extracts into temporary directory and then when you save it actually requires that you specify one of those things. Maybe it doesn't use them directly maybe it's just one of those things that has to be setup for general use of software.

I don't know what exactly it's for (I thought it's for recording/playback only) but it's asking me, so I gotta choose one still which should I go for?

Having those options seems to suggest that it does not rip, but record ( analog way ). Which product from sonicfoundry is it?
I remember playing with sirenjukebox some years ago, but i don't remember how the cd-ripping process was.

Also, to clarify about those settings,
MS Mapper is a "virtual" driver that just selects (maps) to the default soundcard of your system.( you select it in "control panel", Multimedia ). There's no conversion involved of any kind, it is just like saying "use the default soundcard".
The other, is directly the soundcard.

it's SoundForge (not the latest version though), and as I said I don't think it's actually gonna use those things, but it's rather for general setup, becouse the recording is happening in much the same way. first record to temp file, then save. the problem is that right now neither one is selected so it's probably just making sure I have the proggie set up right.

so I guess I'll just pic creative then, since MS mapper gonna pic it inderectly as well.