I have not been umpressed with sound juicer and even grip. I'm a fan
of ripperx. Its in the add/remove section. I had the restricted
drivers installed before I installed ripperx so I never worried about
codecs. I found that ripperx was pretty good about finding the album
art using the cddb. I also liked the reliability it gave me. You can
play with all kinds of setting in the gui to get just the quality you
are looking for.

I have looked at a few IDE programs and have not found one that I like
as of yet. If anyone has some feed back on that I would love to hear
it. Does anyone know of a program that with get the album cover
artwork for a track?