i want to encode a bunch of wav files to ogg. thanks

man oggenc

[troy@Bmx troy]$ man oggenc
No manual entry for oggenc

Maybe you don't have it installed. (on my box it's located in /usr/bin)

You can d/l it from http://www.vorbis.com/

i think arch linux is debian based(?)...well if it is all you have to do is apt-get install vorbis-tools and then you will have oggenc.
if you have trouble figuring out what options to pass to oggenc then you can copy the command line options from grip(if you have that installed) or let us know and someone can help you with that.

im not sure if arch is based off debian...i do know that arch is i686 and debian is i386 only...(correct me if im wrong) but arch's package manager is "pacman" ok i will try that out after i eat something. thanks

ok, for quick reference. could somone tell me how i would encode a blah.wav in 192 bitrate?

and whats the best .ogg bitrate to NOT lose any quality?

oggenc -q 6 blah.wav

you'll get blah.ogg which is not really 192 kbps, but in general most files will be approximatelly 192 kbps. If blah.wav is pure digital silence for example, the bitrate would be very low, but this does not mean blah.ogg is of poor quality, just that blah.ogg can be very easily and effectively compressed with vorbis.

If you really want average bitrate 192 kbps, look at "man oggenc" but recommended and in most cases better is to use the -q (quality setting).
With ogg vorbis or mp3 you'll always lose something. Not that it usually matters, you'll probably not be able to hear the difference. If you want lossless, get flac or some other lossless codec ... and another huge disk
Seriously, if you want high quality, choose -q6, everything above is a waste of disk space. BTW, the default is -q3 and is still very good.