Well, I've recently reencoded my cd collection to lame alt-preset-extreme after discovering that I could hear a difference between standard and extreme. Anyways, it is a very tedious process and one that I am none-too-eager to do again... especially since with lame 4.0 in the future and ogg and the rest I might feel compelled to reencode and eat up another weekend

anyways, is there a way to archive all of my cds to lossless w/tag info (artist, track name, etc) and then create a batch file so that I can click on it whenever a new codec comes out so it'll automatically do the encoding over say a 24 hr period w/o my interference?

There are many programs capable of this. You should be able to find them in the forums. For example: foobar2000, Frontah

well for using a lossless codec, my preference is FLAC, i use it as a medium when i want to rip a batch of cds quickly with tags. i use cdex and my string with flac.exe is



some other posts have the string except they left out the '-' at the beginning which is necessary. if you're using EAC the values in quotes will be different. Or you could use WMP and rip to wma lossless if that suits you. i havent used APE like this so i can't say anything for that.

After that use special installer foobar2000 and additional components and it can convert to mp3, mpc, aac, ogg (everything except wma i think). If you're going to ogg i recommend OGGDropXPd as it seems to go straight FLAC->OGG with no wave file.
I haven't used frontah before, one of sinan's recommendations, so that may be simpler.

Hope you settle on a format soon, i know what its like to rip your cds and afterwards deciding to switch formats