I need some advice on how to go about an important ripping and encoding project. I've got a friend with a very rare and collectible set of about 18 audio CD's and I want to help him do the absolute best job on converting these to computer files. I'm pretty savvy and use EAC with LAME to encode my MP3's --alt-preset extreme. But here's my plan and then I have some questions...

1) make a .iso image of each CD so that I can minimize the time the CD is in my possession
2) mount .iso with daemon tools and then rip from the .iso to individual files on the hard drive
3) encode to the following: WMA-Lossless, Apple Lossless, --alt-preset insane, --alt-preset standard
4) tag each version of the file with the complete info on the recording (liner notes, etc.) and the encoding used in the comments.
5) create CD-audio copies of each disc

My questions correspond to each step in the above process...

1) What is the most anal-retentive method available to ensure a perfect rip? Hardware, read offsets, checking CRC's, etc? I'm used to secure mode on my JLMS 163D, but do I need to do something else?

2) Is ripping from the virtual mount .iso as good as ripping from the real CD? Or am I making a mistake here?

3) Are there batch tools for Apple Lossless? or do I just need to deal with iTunes? I can use Windows Media Encoder to batch process into WMA-lossless right?

4) Is there a single tool that will let me do the tags once and then apply them to each of the four different versions of the album? The four versions are WMA, ALE, and 2 bitrates of MP3. I want to do a really complete job on tags, but don't necessarily want to enter them four different times. I imagine that I'll have all the files in separate folders so I'd like to navigate to the right folder and apply the saved tags for the album. It's only 18 albums, but anything I can do to cut down the time would help.

5) Creating a CD-audio from the .iso is the right way to go, or should I use the "IMG" option in EAC and burn a new CD from that?

Many, many thanks to those that can take the time to help me make sure this little project is successful.

BTW, I'm willing to buy a new drive to do this with. I'm looking at a NEC 3500 16x DL DVD burner anyways, but would buy a plextor premium or other CD-RW drive if it would guarantee the most accurate rip possible.

Bad idea, the image will not be securly ripped.Check this EAC guide out.No it is a badddd idea. foobar2000You should use the tracks ripped with EAC and burn with this.

Are you sure about encoding to two different bitrates of MP3? To me, this seems redundant, especially as you're also going to keep lossless copies (again, two?) of the CDs. --alt-preset standard should be perceptually transparent for practically anything as far as the MP3 format allows this. Are you encoding to MP3 for portable listening? For this, APS should be more than enough.