No, I don't think MP3Pro is worth it. LAME is a better choice for MP3 IMO... and even better than that is AAC. Heck, iTunes can encode to both AAC and MP3 and it is free. I am an iPod nano owner and my car deck can play AAC files, and now, so can our Nintendo Wii. Very few playback devices can take advantage of MP3Pro, and while MP3Pro will playback on standard MP3 players, the result is a muddy, drowning sound.
You can download
EAC and get a
LAME dll and encode your CD's with that for free as well.... or dBpoweramp, CDex, Audacity, AudioGrabber... your free choices are almost endless.
Now, I do own Nero 8... I just don't have it installed. They have yet to work out their product when running SATA in AHCI mode. I've pretty much lost hope in that happening since v7 had the same issue.
Nero is less valuable to me now since I use ImgBurn for most of my burning needs (data cd's and data/video DVD's). I still use a classic app for my audio CD burning needs: Golden Hawk CDRWIN. I'll praise ImgBurn all day, but won't recommend CDRWIN... while I still use it, updates to fully support new drives are few and far between. Also, both take some reading to know how to use. Want a quick and easy way to burn audio CD's of almost any file format? Try
Burrrn.
Happy Holidays!
Sith