I too paid for AudioCatalyst, and used it, Xing and all, in old days of slow machines. I remember that my first rips (using thoroughly misconfigured tools) had clicks like a well worn vinyl and those characteristic 'underwater sound' Xing artifacts. It got a bit better with time and I am not sorry for buying it, either. Now I use AudioGrabber when in hurry (and disks look OK), and EAC for suspicious CDs (both with Lame, of course). I like the AudioGrabber's feature of attaching ID3 data to wav files, which makes unattended bulk encoding easy. (Err, perhaps EAC also has a similar feature; I did not look for it, since with it extraction step is slower than compression.)

When I had Linux at home I used cdparanoia - any recent experience with it - the homepage looks ancient?