I'll throw another free one into the mix that uses LAME encoding: CDex. Free, pretty user friendly, free, not buggy in the least, and...oh, yeah...it's free.

I tried EAC and for some reason that I don't recall now I didn't like it very much. Someone please correct me, but does EAC connect to CDDB? Maybe that was it...

M22ti mains, EP175 sub, VP150 center, QS4 surrounds