so I burned them to cd then reripped them to MP3 for upload to my empeg now they sound like crap

Did you listen to the CD you burned? Does that CD sound bad, too?

Please give more specifics: How, precisely, do they sound like crap?

Plus I had to retag them all did I miss a step or is this a feature to keep people from making mp3's out of them

You had to retag them because CDs don't have tags. It's not a deliberate feature, it's just that CDs were invented before tags were invented.