Flac to MP3 ReplayGain Question

[playboysmoov]

I am in the process of archiving my music collection to FLAC and have a long way to go before its all said in done. My question is two fold I have ripped my files based on spoon's guide to setup dMC. I have the replaygain tags for both track and album in my FLAC files.

However, I play majority of my music on the go via my 160 GB iPod Classic which doesn't support FLAC nor ReplayGain. Which generally means that I have to use the batchconverter to convert from FLAC to MP3. I generally convert my files using Lame MP3 -vbr 2 setting. I have the ref version of the software which allows me to use all four cores of my CPU.

My questions is this, can someone walk me through the steps to use to ensure that my files have replaygain applied to them for my iPod? Currently the tags are there but the effect is not. I'm looking at redoing my entire library over which is about 19,000 songs right now and growing.

Should I be using the the batch converter and what setting should I use for the best sound quality on my device?