G'day KingBrilliant,
I think Winamp is probably the best MP3 player (it also converts MP3 back to wav).

The encoder I use is the freeware program "Plugger". It behaves like a DOS program (OK by me) but it's a 32 bit program (sorry John - won't run under Win 3.1). If you're good with batch files Plugger can easily encode many wav files in one run. There's also a GUI shell available free (I think) which makes using it a lot easier but slows it down to about half speed.

I would avoid using Audioactive Production Studio (AAPS) for encoding unless you want to fork out over $300. I trialled the cheaper shareware version & nearly registered it but found that for maybe 10% of songs/tunes I could hear obvious differences between the mp3 and the wav files. The same wav files converted using Plugger had no such differences.

If you go to www.mp3.com you can track down Plugger and Winamp and download. Plugger is officially free, Winamp costs about $10 to register but is not crippled in any way.

Cheers,
Alan