While of course not condoning the downloading of music (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) you can find a Winamp plugin for mpc here:
http://www.saunalahti.fi/~cse/mpc/winamp/
I've been ripping CDs on occassion in mpc or ogg, it seems like you lose no quality whatsoever in the music in comparison to mp3, even VBR mp3s. You can really tell if you listen to them on a good sound system.