I want to compress and sync mp3 files to my mp3 player or storage card in one step (I'm trying to conserve space on my mp3 player). Windows Media Player 11 allows you to compress and sync in one step but only allows the output files to be in WMA - I need mp3.

A plug in for Windows Media Player would be great. Any other suggestions to make this task easy for me?

Are you ripping from CD, or transcoding from lossless?

Encoding directly to a flash card can be very slow, in my experience, unless you enable write caching. If you do that, you must 'remove' the device from Windows, before you unplug it, to avoid data loss. Flash cards aren't very good for small writes.

I have a huge mp3 library on my hard drive. They are all mp3 files that have been encoded at pretty high bit rates and are therefore relatively large files. I would like to be able to transfer mp3 files to my mp3 phone at a much lower bitrate to save space and cram more music onto my device. I can use a program like dBpower amp but I would prefer a program like Widows Media Player which will is all set up to conveniently sync an mp3 player by allowing you to select a large batch of files from your entire library then reduce the bit rate and sync to your player in one step. The only problem is that the only type of output files WMP allows is WMA. Since my mp3 phone won't read WMAs I need to output to mp3s.

There has to be a program out there similar to Window Media Player that gives the user more control???

If syncing your MP3 player means just copying files to the removable drive, then foobar2000 can do what you want with its 'Converter'. It will take any input file and encode it to any format and place it where ever you want, preserving tags of course.