[rescue] suitability for use question

[Curtis H. Wilbar Jr.]

For quite some time I've been planning a 'pet' project....

Take a 7 Plextor CD-ROM tower, a system, and turn it into
a box that takes 7 audio CDs, rips the tracks and mp3 or ogg
(or both) encodes them including using cddb to populate the
mp3 data and to organize the resulting files into a hierarchy.

Now... the question is what to use.... 

My original plan was to use my SparcServer 1000E with 8
85MHz Supersparcs each with 2M Cache, and the system with 2G
of RAM....

I was originally planning on bladenc, then lame, and now am
looking at notlame.

I also have other boxes at my disposal including:

SGI Octane (1 225MHZ R10K)
Ultra 60 (450MHz single)
Athlon 650
Athlon 600
Dual PIII 933
Dual PIII 550
iMac DV Se 500MHz
Celeron 1.2GHz socket 370 (powerleap slocket on a BX chipset board)

Given this potential hardware to use... what would you recommend.

Is notlame the better of the three encoders ?  What bitrate... I
was originally thinking 128K, but am now thinking 192K (for MP3
anyway).  What about VBR ?  use it or avoid it ?

Which platform would give me the best performance and would it do
so by ripping and encoding each CD separately, or faster by 
ripping and encoding 7 in parallel (that was my original idea
figuring with the 8 procs in the SS1000E that it would work
out pretty well, but now I'm more concerned with speed and
since most of my boxes available are uniprocessor I'd imagine
they are going to be more efficient by encoding sequentially
(possibly ripping from one disc while encoding another ?)).

What recommend UNIX tools do you recommend for the ripping ?
How about pulling cddb information and populating the mp3 file
with the info ?

Maybe not exactly rescue related... but a way to use rescue
related equipment....

Thanks in advance for advice/info.

-- Curt