Audio CD > ISO
 

What is the best program to convert...

Audio CD --> ISO

or

Audio CD --> Mp3 (highest quality) w/ cuesheet

I'm burning a few special cds that I want to have backed up on my hd, thanks.

audio cd -> mp3: eac with lame cli encoder. There's a guide somewhere in the Behind the Music forum, I think (was it reposted since the forum crash?).

audio cd -> iso: no method is fullproof, but for discs with ONLY audio on them (no data tracks with extras) you can use the lossless guide in the same forum, or just set up EAC according to that guide and create a wav/cue with it (and then compress the huge wav file in some lossless compression).

I think he's talking about taking an audio CD and making a disc image out of it.

Then the best way to do it is to just make an image using Alcohol 120%.

Yeah, but I remember hearing that the ISO format does not support more than one track/sesssion. It will only use the data track if it exists.
I'd just use the WAV/CUE option in EAC, open EAC and choose the "Copy Image & Create CUE Sheet" option under the Action menu. This will extract all the audio CD's tracks to one large wav file and make a CUE sheet for reference of where the tracks begin.
Using a program like Daemon tools, you could mount the CUE sheet and have it emulate an audio CD under Windows, or you could just use a program like foobar2000 that supports direct reading of CUE sheets (this includes APE/CUE and FLAC/CUE formats).
Also the last time I used Alcohol 120% to copy a CD with Audio tracks, all the tracks began two seconds into the song, I'm guessing Alcohol guessed the CD's gaps wrong. When dealing with a pure Audio CD, EAC is the best choice IMO (you can learn more on how to make perfect WAV/CUE files by going here).

Thanks for the help guys, i did check out the EAC tool before I posted this. I'll go ahead and do that. I also checked out clonecd which worked ok. Thanks for all the help. I'll most likely use EAC.