First, I want to make sure you know about EAC's queue feature... You can pop in a CD, rip that CD, then pop in CD #2 and start ripping it before CD #1 has finished compressing.

Right. That's what I'm doing. However, I'm finding that is taking me so long to get my filenames set up exactly right (remember, I'm generating my tags from the filenames using MP3TS) that by the time I have everything just right, the previous CD has usually finished encoding by the time I'm starting the next. Oh, filenames are *easy* with CDs like "Moving Pictures" by Rush. All I have to do is prepend the word "Rush" to each track title, and I'm done, because the FreeDB database for a common CD like that is usually dead-on accurate. But when I go to "A Treasury of Classical Music, Volume 03", the third disk of a 10 disk set, and that disk contains 21 different tracks by 21 different composers, and track titles from the database say something like "Symphony #7" and I'm wanting something like "Beethoven-Symphony #7 in A Major Opus 92, 1st Movement 'Poco Sostenuto' (Allegro Vivace)" it takes a long time to get that CD ready to rip! For that reason, it becomes doubly frustrating when Lame causes EAC to temporarily lock up, preventing me from working on the next disk.

That is why I would like a way to separate the ripping from the encoding -- rip with EAC and have it set up the batch files or whatever it does to run Lame but not actually start the Lame process(es) until I tell it to do so.

You say I can later tell EAC to convert those WAV's to mp3 in one batch process. and that's what I want to do. But I don't see how to do it. Not even sure how to just rip the CDs to WAV files without automatically calling up the external encoder. What am I missing?

tanstaafl.

(Edited to add final paragraph)