I have used two separate media organizer programs, Creative Media Source and Media Monkey, and neither of them could encode tracks from audio CD's in .mp3 format without an expensive upgrade, which very much bothers me, since I have always presumed that it was a free format due to being the most ubiquitous audio format in the world. I shall likely pay for the upgrade so that I can encode .mp3 files, but it still is annoying, and I feel that it should not be necessary.
What does everyone else say about this? Why does a fee need to be paid to encode .mp3 files?