EAC and Lame is a very good choice for MP3's
Here's what you want to do:
Use Secure Mode and make sure to test your drive for what it can do. Mine is a Lite-On 52x CD-RW and I have Secure Mode: Drive has Accurate Stream Feature and drive caches audio data marked. You also want to do secure gap detection which is on the appropriately named "Gap Detection" tab in that same options menu.
Second you will want to download Lame 3.90.3 for your encoding usage. It can be found on the hydrogenaudio.com forums (that's where I got it anyway). The reason is because it is tuned better for the alt preset standards that were introduced. In "Compression Options" in EAC I have "Use external program for Compression selected", user defined encoder selected, .mp3 file extension and then the path to the Lame 3.90.3.exe selected in that target window. Don't use the EAC built-in tagging options for your tags, instead use a command line like this:
--alt-preset standard --add-id3v2 --pad-id3v2 --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" --tg "%m" --tc "Ripped and Encoded by ZoNtO (using EAC 095pb5 and Lame 3.90.3 VBR --alt-preset standard)" %s %d
That's a direct copy and paste from my command line options on that same page. If you want to up the bitrate you are more than welcome too, but standard is a great VBR quality rip that is transparent for many people. If you want to change the bitrate up, simply change the "standard" above to "extreme" and it will give you a bitrate range from I think 200-250 rather than 170-220 or thereabouts. Also not that the --tc is what is going to be in the comments of your MP3 files, so you'd want to change that to whatever you want yours to read (inside the quotes that follow the --tc of course)
Also something to worry about is how you want to organize your music. In the EAC Options menu, go to the filename tag and change that to your liking. I have mine set to:
%D\%C\%A - %C - %N - %T
This creates a folder in my D:/My Music folder with the artist name, another folder inside that with the album title, then each track is in that album folder. It ends up like this:
Blink-182\Dude Ranch\Blink-182 - Dude Ranch - 01 - Pathetic.mp3
or whatever album/song it is. Change that to suit your tastes as well, it has a listing of what it means underneath it. Also in that EAC Options menu, select High on "Error Recovery Quality" in order to get the best quality wav files.
After you do all this, go ahead and configure the freedb options and make sure that when you put a cd in that all the info is correct like year, artist, title, track titles, etc... I do the first letter of all my songs and artists capital letter in order to make it look uniform. So instead of:
Blink-182 - All the Small Things, it's: Blink-182 - All The Small Things
A little nuance, but I like it, change it how you want to.
When all this is done, go ahead and select "Copy Selected Tracks - Compressed" and let it do its thing. It will rip the wavs, compress the MP3 and then if you clicked "Delete WAV after Compression" on the Compression tag it will delete the wav after as well. I also selected "Create .m3u playlist on extraction" so I can just double click on that and get all the tracks to play in WMP. Another touch I do is to go to either
www.amazon.com or
www.allmusic.com and do a search for the cd. Once that comes up click on the CD art image and then save that JPEG file to the actual album folder as "folder.jpg". Then when you play the items in Windows Media Player and have "Album Art" selected as your visualization, it will show the Cover Art to your CD! It's pretty cool and is a nice touch IMO.
After you do this you are going to want to use a program called
MP3 Gain which can be found in the Downloads section of the previously linked website.
NOTE: (You'll want to probably get the one that has the visual basic runtime files in it the first time.) CDs nowadays are gained above normal "no-clipping" listening levels. During the encoding process and even at the production studios, most modern CDs are a little bit clipped when they release them to the public, meaning that some of the audio signal is actually cut off because its amplified so much. What I would recommend you do after you rip your MP3s to the folder, is open up MP3 gain and add that specific album folder to it with the "Add Folder" button in the top left. Then go to options>advanced> and tick the Enable "Maximizing" features option. After this, go ahead and click on "Modify Gain" up at the top and choose "Apply Max No-Clip Gain to Album". I do the Album Gain selections because it keeps the tracks of that album relative to each other loudness wise, but makes it so they don't clip. Other people prefer to choose the "Apply Album Gain" selection to that target normal value of 89 dBa. Technically anything above this 89 dBa value can have clipping (it is called K-14 by the studios for some reason), but quite honesly it just made my MP3s to quiet for my personal liking. After you apply the no clip gain for the ALBUM, go ahead and close MP3 Gain and open up the .m3u playlist. I'm sure you'll be thrilled at the quality and extras of your rips.
Also, after rereading your post I realized I didn't technically answer your questions. Being blunt about it, your command line sucks right now. alt-preset 128 is an ABR mp3 I believe while standard or extreme is a VBR (what you want). If you want the best quality MP3, do the settings I gave to you, exactly as I gave to you either keeping the "standard" or changing the "standard" to "extreme" if you want that extra bitrate. The reasoning behind this is that the all-preset settings are specially tuned from within the encoder, so by altering other settings and added your other 128 and 192 bitrate selection stuff you are totally nullifying the benefits of the setting in itself. Use these standard or extreme settings COMPLETELY BY THEMSELVES (at least with regards to the mp3 bitrate, etc.. not tags). Also,
don't forget to change the comments string to what you want it to read!!!
If you're going to be playing the MP3s on any sort of portable media player, I would say that standard preset would be MORE than sufficient for your needs. I'm an audiophile and I really can't tell the difference between standard and extreme on 99% of the songs I tried. Also, make sure to unclick the auto create ID3 tags in EAC. The command line I gave you automatically tags the files based off the information either you or CDDB gives for the CD. Basically it takes everything you see in that main window when you are ripping, and makes the tag out of it. That is why you want to make absolutely sure it's correct information so you don't have to go back and type it all in again.
As for the MP3 player playing off of the ID3 tags, it would really depend on the player but if you have the tags done then you should be able to sort by artist, album, and track number and just play them in order. If you have your albums separated by folders on the actual player then you would just navigate to the folder and maybe select play all or something. Just try it out and see!
I hope this cleared the process up for you. I'm going through the process right now of archiving my entire CD collection to FLAC format in images and then ripping them to preset standard mp3s for computer listening. I did my research and this is the recommended way of doing it on all the major audiophile forums I checked. Here's some more resources if you want to read up on trying other formats or archiving to a lossless format, etc.. etc..:
Hydrogenaudio.com Forum General FAQ
Afterdark Forums LAME Settings Thread
EAC Settings for Musepack, etc.. (mp3 included)
Lyricsdownload.com (if you want to add lyrics to the ID3 tag, has to be done manually as far as I know... I did it for Blink-182 albums cuz they are my fave, but it got redundant)
I hope this helped man, if you have any other questions feel free to PM me. I seriously spent like 15 hours researching all this stuff two weekends ago, and I feel I've got a good grasp on what to do by now (by no means an expert, but competent enough). Have fun!