I'd second the endorsement of AudioCatalyst - it's the fastest method that I've found. Turn on all of the file naming options, and turn on ID3 tagging. Put a CD in the drive, select 'cddb' to fill the names and such, then right-click a title, go to select all. Select the options/ID3 window, edit the publication year and genre, then click OK. Click 'grab', and wait 10-20 minutes.

Your CD read speed will be determined by the DAO speed of your CD-ROM drive. They vary from 1x up, I get about 12x, which I'm really pleased with. I've got another machine that gets 5x. Encoding speed is based upon the speed of your CPU.

-Dane