This may be obvious to everyone here, so forgive me. I have been fooling around with Tunebite to try to get improved recordings from protected WMA files into MP3 format. I am using LAME. The newer version of Tunebite does a much better job of setting LAME from within the program. I was, however, experiencing varied results in copying my Napster tracks over to MP3. Mostly, these seemed to be low volume on some tracks. I had assumed that this had something to do with the quality of the original file on Napter (there are variously encoded tracks there using WM 7,8 and 9, 9 sounding MUCH better).
Anyhow, here is the "obvious" part---Tunebite uses WMP 9 or 10 to play tracks that it records (or iTunes), and you have to make sure the volume control in WMP is set all the way up. You can turn your system volume up, down, mute, etc without screwing anything up, but if you have your WMP volume down, you get a very low volume recording. Don't laugh if you all knew this already--I am learning this through trial and error.