What the the audio equivalent procoder? Essentially, I would like to know what is the most robust and versatile program for converting multiple audio formats into other audio formats. Any takers?

Squeeze and Vegas...that's all I use. With the Vegas Batch Encoder, I'm quite happy. We had a project for an online marketing company a couple months ago, that needed over 1000 files converted into 2 formats each. Was a very fast job with the Vegas Batch tool, and meta data could be inserted, too.
Squeeze does a good job in the PC world too.
And of course, in the Apple land, there is Compressor, which does a great job with some formats, tho less of a job with others.