I'm studying Japanese and rip CDs that some books provide.
Can anybody offer a simpler and faster way to convert such CDs to small Nero LC-AAC files in mono at a sample rate of 22,050? I did it as described below, but it sure wasn't as easy as with OggDropXPd!

Now You're Talking has a 96-track CD, all in stereo at 44,100 sample rate. I ripped with EAC to a single FLAC (a timing error was reported early on), concurrently creating a CUE file. The FLAC I mono-fied and downsampled to 22,050 using CoolEdit, then used the CUE file with "Cue Splitter" to split the 96 tracks in mono at a 22,050 sample rate. I used Foobar with Nero's encoder for Q=0.47 to get fine-sounding LC-AAC files at VBRs around 50 kbps average. Two files came out at size zero and I had to convert the individual FLAC single tracks at 44,100 and stereo to the smaller FLAC size and then again encode with Nero to get those done.
I'm using these in the Nokia N800, which is friendlier to M4A than MP3 and doesn't straight-from-box play *.ogg.

Maybe someone can give you a better solution, but I'd try something like this.

You should rip the CD as wav tracks, not one image. Then, write a small batch that calls Naoki Shibata's SSRC for each track to downsample them, erase original ones, then calls neroaacenc for each downsampled wav and finally delete wavs. Then all your job would be to rip CD with EAC to some folder and call the batch file.

By the way, why don't you use HE-AAC? You can get at least 2 times smaller files of nearly same quality. I don't know if your Nokia can play them though...

Hope this helps

Since you have CoolEdit and want the individual 96 tracks
extract tracks as individual wav files
do batch processing with CoolEdit to convert those files to 22kHz mono - very simple and fast; output to a different directory than the source files
encode the resultant files