How to rip mp3s the right way:

Preparation:

Acquire the following software:

Audiograbber v1.82:

Can be found at http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/.
You can get a trial version, but I just went ahead and bought it. Extremely useful program, and only $20 with a year (at least) of free upgrades. Hard to beat!

LAME v3.93.1:

LAME is an open source MP3 encoder released under the GPL. That means it's free! It also happens to be pretty sweet. The LAME homepage is http://lame.sourceforge.net/ and you can find win32 binaries at http://hot.ee/smpman/mp3/.

Installation:

Install Audiograbber by running the executable you downloaded. I put my Audiograbber in C:\Program Files\Audiograbber. Once this install is complete, extract LAME.EXE from the zip file and copy it into C:\Program Files\Audiograbber.

Configuration:

Start Audiograbber. Here come some screenshots. We'll walk through the menus one by one and get all the options right.

General Settings
I change the directory that it stores media in to D:\mp3\incoming. Change this to a directory you visit often. Nothing worse than ripping a ton of albums then not being able to find them and wondering where the space went.

Naming Tab:

A note about naming conventions:

Through a long process of experimentation and wishy-washyness, I've come up with the following naming scheme for my mp3 collection:

ARTIST - ALBUM - TRACK# - TRACKNAME.mp3

Whenever I'm ripping an entire album, I keep the album in a subdirectory of the artist directory, with all the files in this format. If I have any loose singles of this artist, they'll stay in the root artist directory as ARTIST - TRACKNAME.mp3.

Given this, under the naming tab, I check the advanced box and enter "%1 - %2 - %3 - %4". If you choose to adhere to my superior naming standard, you should enter the same. Also, I check "Artist as a directory" and "Album as a directory". This keeps things nice and neat if you're ripping a lot. If you're convinced you have a better method, be my guest.

CD-ROM access method:
The default settings are all correct. Make sure you have the correct drive selected if you have more than one CD drive. Another great option at the bottom is "Rip as much as possible to RAM". This is fantastic for minimizing the amount of noise introduced into the extracted audio if your computer is also performing other tasks at the time, especially if you have gobs of RAM. Check it, the default RAM value given is automatically set to the vast majority of the RAM you currently have in that computer, it should be OK.

You don't need to change any other settings in the General Settings window. Time to move on! Open up..

MP3 Settings

We're not just ripping, we're also going to be encoding MP3s, so change the "grab to" radio button to "MP3 via intermediate wav file. Delete the wav file." We can't rip straight to mp3, because LAME is an external program, and Audiograbber can't feed the file directly to LAME without first saving it out as raw audio (.wav).

Note that there IS a LAME .dll that allows it to be used as an internal encoder. However, this .dll does not allow command line arguments, like the ones we're going to use to improve the quality of the encoding, to be used. Thus, we stick with the LAME .exe instead.

Now, turn off ID3v1 tags. They're obsolete, gross, and we definitely don't want them. Also, rip all tracks before encoding. It uses more hard drive space temporarily, but it takes less time because it doesn't have to keep spinning up the CD with each new track.

Browse to the directory you installed Audiograbber in and choose the lame.exe that you copied in there earlier (you did copy it in there didn't you?) as your external encoder. The predefined arguments should be "Lame 128 Kbit/s Joint Stereo." "But I want higher qualty than that!" you tell me. Well, so do I, and that's why we're providing command line arguments below that supercede the predefined ones.

The command line arguments should read "%s %d --preset standard" See below for an explanation of what this does.

Uncheck "Encoder is capable of using stdin/stdout as data stream.

If you're ever ripping/encoding while something else is going on, you'll thank me later for suggesting that you change Launch encoder to "As audiograbber currently is". This way, if you minimize Audiograbber, the LAME window doesn't make itself the active application with EVERY new track it encodes and steal focus. Trust me, it's annoying.

A note on LAME settings:

Here's a snippet from the LAME command line help that explains what the LAME settings we're using are. The preferred method used to be --r3mix, but apparently in the last year or so, those who really care and know about these sorts of things have determined that the numerous settings invoked with the preset standard provide better quality than the old r3mix settings, so conceding to their wisdom, I made the switch.

For VBR modes (generally highest quality):
"--preset standard" This preset should generally be transparent to most people on most music and is already quite high in quality.

Normalize Settings:

I have a confession to make: I normailze. I'm sure some of you are screaming in horror right now, but I'm not ashamed of it. Normalization adjusts the volume per track so the loudest part of each track is about as loud as it can be without clipping. It can also screw up tracks, if they were never meant to be loud. Two examples:

Black Sabbath - Paranoid is a horribly mastered album. It's all quiet, you have to crank your system to hear anything. If you're playing a track from this album in a mix and you haven't normalized it, its going to be all quiet, then you crank it to hear the song and when the next one comes on, you get blown away.

Pink Floyd - The Wall has a number of tracks that never get very loud at all. If you normalize this one, those tracks sound like crap.

In all honesty, you should probably leave normalization off unless you're particularly unsatisfied with a particular rip, in which case you should rip it with normalization on. YMMV.

Freedb Settings:
Freedb is one of the coolest things about Audiograbber. It makes tagging new albums effortless! No typing involved! You should definitely have it auto-query and autosave freedb queries. This way, when you insert a new CD, it will automatically go out on the internet, retrieve the artist/album/track names, and name each track appropriately. You can even stick your email address in there if you feel daring enough, or like spam.

ID3v2 Tag:

You definitely want to tag. It makes renaming and organizing your mp3s much easier. ID3v2 tags are the way to go, as they're not limited to a certain number of characters per field like the v1 tags are. (Gross!)

Might as well throw in the "Software used" and "Encoded By" fields so all your friends know where these super high quality rips are coming from.

Also, change track numbers to "Track number only". Some programs choke when trying to sort "Track number/total tracks". Don't say I didn't warn you!

Copy Status:

Last thing before we rip. You may have to insert a CD to change this. Right click on a track then select "Copy status". We're going to change this so it displays some actually useful information. Uncheck "checksum" and check "Rip speed" and "possible speed problems".

The rip speed is handy for knowing how decent the drive you're ripping from is. It will also indicate problems with the disc, as the speed will be really low if it's having problems reading it.

You will see possible speed problems when the computer was too busy at the moment to write down all the data as fast as the drive was feeding it. This is usually because you were doing something disc-intensive while you were ripping. Shame on you! Possible speed problems usually manifest themselves as popping or other noise artifacts in the resulting mp3. It's harder to create speed problems if you've enabled the "Rip as much as possible to RAM" earlier, like I told you to.

Execution:
Holy crap, we're ready to rip! Insert a CD. The track list should appear, then it should retrieve the names from Freedb. Hit "Grab!" and sit back and wait for 10 mins or so. When it's done, your window should look something like the one to the left. Enjoy your new high quality MP3s!