....and a million suggestion came piling in.

Personally I use Audiograbber to rip, it calls upon LAME to do the encoding passing the "--alt-preset standard" setting to it.
It will do a lookup for the artist & track info.

Another option for ripping (and calling LAME) is EAC, which has become much more user-friendly - althoug I do think it has a way to go.

By having a Plextor drive you are a long way toward getting good clean and fast rips.

You are going to get many many suggestions for rippers, but the majority of the replies will recommend LAME for the encode, and more then likely mention the "--alt-preset standard" as well.

Spend your time figuring all this out as you only want to rip you collection once.