Ah, Boston is one of my favourite US cities. Haven't been there in a few years, but when I'm ready for my next trip down there I'll give you shout. If you like Italian, I quite like Saraceno. We have offices in Marlborough so I may just make a trip down at some point.

I'll try emailing you the files as soon as I finish this message. If that's a no-go for whatever reason, I'll hunt down the page on Adaptec's site and post the link here.

The mass-drag to Audiograbber will cause an encode confirmation window to pop up. In that window you can also turn on/off the normalizing feature. When you press OK it will start the encode and it will then rename your files with the full format you specified and also make all the proper folders (again part of the naming format string you define in the first settings window). If you're using the internal encoder then you see the same progress window with stats. If you chose external then you get a dialog that shows what file is being worked on, its name and how many files are left. You also get a console window (that you can tell AG to minimize) with the LAME command-line program running in it.

It's about the best way I've found to do this stuff. It's great because you can maximise your ripping by not stopping to encode. And then do the encoding when you won't need to be around.

Don't forget, you can also delete or keep the original WAV files. I delete mine unless I'm doing temporary testing.

If you're primarily going to use your MP3 files with the empeg, you may as well skip making ID3v1 tags and go with only ID3v2. I used to do both but then I did a mass remove of all v1 data - now I do v2 only.

I haven't been using AG much lately because I haven't bought any new CDs. I'll be moving soon so I should hold off on buying anything until I find a house and get moved in. Jackie (the guy behind AG) is working on some cool features for the next major rev though - hopefully in time for when I go on another eBay CD-buying spree. Hehe.

Bruno