Digital music: Best Lossless Rips for CD archiving

Best Lossless Rips for CD archiving

I was hoping to get a little bit of Member help on setting up a lossless music archiving schema. I know that Lee Koo wrote a great answer to a similar question back in 2005 but obviously technology has changed. Any help is much appreciated! I tried to write out my specifcs and questions in a way that made sense to you guys!

My set-up
- New Windows Vista machine
- About 700 CDs...mostly excellent to mint condition.
- No portable player purchased or selected yet.
- I do like WMP for playback and I'm trying to avoid installing too much new software to limit problems but if I should go with something else, I will.

My needs:
General: I want to archive my CDs to make an exact replica of the CD for playing on my computer, for archiving, and potentially for using in some sort of home-system (Sqeeze, Sonos). But for the time being, I want to put my CDs away. I want to do this one-time and do it right. I don't want to have to do this again!

Portable: I do want to move these files to a portable device at some point. I would love to go to an iPod but know that that limits my choices. I'm thinking that I will probably look to a program that can batch convert (I think that is the right term) on the fly to a low-grade mp3 for listening on head-phones/portable.

Album Art: I want it. I think I would prefer HighDef although I don't really know the difference.

Tags: Most definitely.

Quality: Perfect....size doesn't matter....HD space is cheap!

Where I am now:
- I'm almost 100% sure I will go with FLAC and then batch convert to mp3 for an ipod. I don't want two copies of the files so I'd like to let them convert as I DL to the ipod. Is that possible?
- I want perfect copies and as such I think I want to employ AccurateRip.
- I don't know what Ripper/Encoder to use. I installed EAC but it looks daunting....expecially for album art. I'm torn between Foobar, EAC, DBPoweramp and MediaMonkey. This is my biggest question and I really don't know which way to go. I also keep hearing about certain rippers (EAC) being more accurate. I don'tunderstand that. If it is Lossless, isn't it already perfect? Something can't be "more perfect" can it? Clearly, I'm missing something. I don't mind paying some money for a program as long as it is secure/safe. I'm not a big fan of making purchases online that aren't to a "name-brand" site but I'll trust your advice on what is legit.

- Do I need Cue sheets?

- Since I want them to be exact replicas, I want to keep the gaps intact...like with Pink Floyd's "The Wall". How do I set that up.

- I also don't know what type of CD Drive is in my computer so I need a ripper that auto-detects.

Thanks for all of your help! I'm sure I'm forgetting something!