using exact audio copy, or another program to convert cd's to flac

[Chris Skarstad]

            Hey folks

Subject line basicly tells the story.  I have some cd's that were sent 
to me, and i'd like to rip them to the pc, but i'd like to make them 
sound as good as possible.  I am a huge fan of FLAC, or free lossless 
audio codec files.  The file size is a bit larger but the sound quality 
is supurb if you're listening on a good system.  Looking online, I saw 
many people mention a program called Exact Audio copy, which has been 
around for years, does anyone on here have experience using that?  My 
hope is to convert the cd's to flac files, and use the cd database to 
grab the song titles from the internet.  I was thinking of using CDEX, 
but sadly, i've never been able to get the CDDB, or Gracenote

 servers to find anything.  Anyone know anything about this?  Thanks 
for any ideas folks.
Chris