cd playback is a pretty bad bet on PCs as far as I understand it. You're better off encoding them to your HD in some sort of lossless format, and then playing them off the HD. Don't ask me why. One thing I do know is that it will be much more convenient. I use Foobar, which is considered by many to be the best in terms of sound and features (it's open source, so there are plenty of add ons).
