• Интернет архив : бардовская песня by Alexey Mamarin. Great collection of audio files (56 kbps 44 kHz mono MP3), useful "Internet resources" section. Very slow server.
• Bard Cafe. Tons of links to various audio collections of VERY different quality. It's a messy site, but if you have time... Starting from Bard Cafe, you can get to almost every bard songs collection in existence with just a few clicks. The trick is to choose the right clicks. And pray the links are not broken. Their own biggest collection is at audio.bard-cafe.komkon.org.
• Владимир Высоцкий by Masha Shkol'nikova. The best collection of Vladimir Vysotsky's records that I know of. They are in Real Audio, and the quality leaves much to be desired. There are (or at least there were at the time of this writing) actually MP3s on this server (but no links to them, you need to modify URLs by hand). Still, the quality isn't much better. In many cases this is apparently a result of the bad quality of the original record. For other songs, the problem seems to be poor digitizing.
• Авторская песня у Серго и Чижа. Most records are in low quality Real Audio, but there are many songs there that I could not find anywhere else. The server is not always available, there is a mirror at ksp.edison.ru/mirror/www.bards.ru/index.htm. Both servers are slow.
• Bard songs archive from Kulichki. Real Audio only, about 300 songs.
• Little Russia in San Antonio, TX. Mostly Real Audio.
• www.RbcMp3.com. Large collection of very high quality records (well made 128 kbps 44 kHz stereo MP3). Not only bard songs, all kinds of russian music. Unfortunately, they recently started to restrict access to their MP3 collection - you have to buy something from them in order to get the password.

MP3 information, links to software :

• MP3.com.
• ZDNet guide.

Players/Decoders :

• WinAmp. Still the best MP3 player I think. Can be used to convert MP3s to WAVs. It's a freeware now, and you can get lots of skins and plug-ins on its home page.
• Real Player.
• Since MP3 format has become a standard, lots of other players will decode it. Chances are, you alredy have some application capable of playing MP3 files on your PC.

CD rippers and MP3 encoders :

• Exact Audio Copy. Free CD ripper with advanced error correction capabilities. Good for scratched or otherwise problematic disks. Beta.
• RealJukebox. Basic version is free, Plus version (which you need to encode high quality MP3s) is $29.99. It is also a player and a CD ripper.
• CDex.Free MP3 encoder and CD ripper.
• RealProducer.
• Easy CD Creator by Adaptec, which probably came with your CD burner, will happily work as a ripper, too.

Sound editors :

• Cool Edit 2000. Noise reduction, normalizing, filtering, special effects, MP3 and RA encoding, and much more. SDK is available (with easy-to-modify sample code) to write your own filters. Shareware, $69. Two plugins are also available (cost extra) for mixing sound from several sources, and for cleaning up the noise from digitized vinil recordings. For the latter purpose, you can also use free plugin written by Evgueny Tchetchetkine.