Hi.

i feel like an idiot....

Don't do that (feeling like an idiot as well as direct ripping to .mp3).

EAC (IIRC) does not support direct ripping to mp3, but has everything integrated to automatically encode to mp3 after ripping and deleting the .wav after encoding finished.
There are reasons why I say you shouldn't rip to mp3 directly, the best reason not to do that is simply time: If you rip directly to mp3, you have to wait for the encoding of a CD (resp. CD-track) before you can switch to the next CD (track). With EAC, you rip each disc as fast as the drive and CD allow, and switch to the next disc immediately (as long as you have enough space left on your HD). This way, I have been ripping litterally 2 dozens CDs in 2 hours after work, and left my PC encoding them during the night (with some already finished while still ripping). If I did rip and encode in one go, I wouldn't have done more than 4-6 CDs in that time.
One other reason are possible read errors. EAC does its best to detect these, and also compares CRCs with those CRCs it knows (from the TOC) AFAIK. These detections work best when you rip to WAV first.
Third reason: normalization. If you want EAC to normalize the WAV before encoding (a thing I won't do), you need to rip to WAV first. The reason why I won't let EAC do the normalization is twofold: First, EAC only normalizes so that the highest peak is within 99% of the maximum peak (or whatever value you configure EAC to), but it does not normalize to a given average volume/power. The other reason is that MP3 supports floating point arithmetics by default (even though the ARM implementation is fixed point/integer only) , and it allows for a floating point correction factor to be applied to each block/segment/<whateveritiscalled>. This does (in theory at least) allow for a better resolution in the amplification of the waveform. Well, at least in theory. But as I apply a volume based normalization to my MP3s anyway, I would do double normalization if I let EAC do its normalization, and that would be a bad thing to do.

cu,
sven