I've never used Audioactive. Performs depends a lot on the CDROM drive you have, available memory and CPU speed, etc.. I happen to have a 1 mHz machine with a 40x CDROM drive and 750 MB ram. Audiograbber will let you rip entirely to ram and then flush to disk at the end, which helps to speed things up...along with the 40x CDROM drive. As its ripping, it commonly displays 30x speed being acheived while ripping from the CD. Then lame typically takes about 1 minute per song. All in all, it takes about 10 minutes to rip and encode each CD. However, what I usually do is rip a whole bunch of CD's WITHOUT encoding to MP3. Audiograbber has an option to put all the wav files into one flat directory. Then after I have say about 300 songs ripped to wave in this directory, I drag and drop all of them onto Audiograbber and it automatically encodes them all, one at a time, using lame. As its encoding them, it automatically puts them into folders by artist/album based on the ID3 info stored in the wav files and fills out the ID3 tags. Then I just let that run for a few hours and go away from the computer. It typically takes me about an hour or so to rip 300-400 songs into WAV and then it takes maybe 5-6 hours to encode them all. For lame, this is very fast I know. I have a fast machine. Other encoders are way faster, but I like the quality of lame.

later