... but I have a couple of follow up questions to my post from a few days ago.

VBR: Ok, so here's what I'm wondering. Let's say I encode a song in CBR at 320 kbps and then encode the same song in VBR at whatever it's highest rate is (I assume that's 320). According to my understanding, VBR will only encode the frames that need to be at 320 at that rate, and everything else at it's corresponding rate. The CBR file records everything at 320 kbps, even the stuff that doesn't need it (wouldn't benefit from it?). Is it accurate to say then that the two recordings would be of equal audio quality?

LAME: Ok, I'm a little slow. It looks to me like LAME is some sort of plug-in, rather than it's own software (like say, MusicMatch). So I guess the question is, which software should I be looking to use it with? Maybe a better way to approach this is to tell you what I'm looking to do, and see if that narrows down the possiblities. Basically, I'm looking to rip/encode a few hundred cds. I want to be able to encode them in VBR with a high end of at least 320 kbps. Dunno if I got this right, but from another post on here, I got the sense that maybe I have to rip the files to my hard drive seperately and then encode them as the second step. Is there software that does both? I know Musicmatch does, but people don't seem to keen on it's VBR ability, and it seems not to encode anything higher than 192 in VBR mode.

Sorry for all the questions. Please don't flog me.