I encode everything to Ogg Vorbis for use at home, but I've got conversion scripts for re-coding to mp3 (for stuff I've already ripped) and my scripts now generate the .mp3s as well as .oggs at rip time. All the mp3s are done on whole albums with --nogap (so that Dark Side of the Moon and Abbey Road are listenable), and all the ripping is done with cdparanoia with maximum paranoia. And the artist/title/album tags are set in both the oggs and the mp3s, pulling info from a local CDDB/freedb tree and letting you see/edit it before tagging begins (or letting you enter it yourself if the album isn't in the database).

The ripping and encoding are decoupled so you can run one or both at once (e.g. you can defer encoding while ripping a bunch of albums, then encode while you're sleeping/at work, or you can do them simultaneously)

It's all python and Bourne shell stuff tested only under Linux, but if you're handy you might be able to get it running under Windows with a bit of tweaking. It's also pretty rough around the edges but I'd happily let anyone who wants to have a copy (under GPL). Needs oggenc for the ogg stuff, LAME for mp3 stuff, cdparanoia for ripping. I think python 1.5 or newer should be fine.

Sumner