I have a bunch of Flacs that I would like to convert to MP3's for portable use. How do I configure Foobar to rip with Lame 3.96.1 to preset "medium"? I don't want to use the naming scheme that I'm using with my Flacs because the screen on my portable device is not that big. So I would like to use something like this:

"artist - [album] - track title"

Thanks!

You'll need to download LAME, and point the diskwriter at it. IIRC theres a preset already in there for LAME, so setup should be pretty simple.

Then you can specify a format string for the output. "artist - [album] - track title" would be %artist% - '['%album%']' - %title%. Pretty easy to understand I think. Only trick is to remember that you need to put the ' around the brackets.

How do I point the diskwriter at it?

You need the CLI encoder dll first. You can get it at http://www.saunalahti.fi/cse/foobar2000.php. It adds support for external command line encoders.

Then what?

1.copy it to foobar's directory and run foobar
2.add files to playlist you want to convert
3.go to preferences -> diskwriter -> output presets and choose: command line encoder: LAME --alt preset medium
4.press edit to choose some parameters:
-encoder: add path to location where you have your lame.exe
-tag: choose tags you want to add to your files- for portable best choice is id3v1 or id3v2, if your player supports it; click ok
5.select all your files you want to convert in your playlist, right click, convert -> run conversion.

So Foobar will automatically convert the FLAC tags to either id3v1 or id3v2 right? I don't need to reenter the tag information?

Yes.