With Audiograbber and a good CD-ROM drive (Plextor UltraMax being the best drive on the planet, bar none) you can rip an entire CD in a couple of minute. Yes, literally a "couple" = 2. :)



Although I agree with most everything else you have written, I've got to express a differing opinion here.

EAC for Windows is the second best ripper out there. CDParanoia, for the Unix platform being the first.

EVERYTHING you do after the rip, be it tagging, encoding at 320kps or 128, is going to be effected by the quality of your rip. IMNSHO, you should take the extra time to ensure that the rip is the best possible, even if that means that it takes twice as long.

I'm using both a Plextor, as well as a yamaha drive here, and while they are both VERY good, the disks they scan are not always. Without Paranoia or EAC, you'll get errors. With paranoia, it takes me about 4 minutes to do the rip on a good disk. On a bad disk, it takes significantly longer, but I've gotten perfect results out of disks that skip like crazy on a cd-player.

Speed is not everything when it comes to the rip. I'd rather KNOW that it was correct than have to do it again.

Personally, I'm using a hacked copy of ABCDE for Debian. It uses CDparanoia to rip all the songs, drops them into a folder, and starts the encoding in the background. Tags them from CDDB, and pushs them into my upload folder to the empeg. It's hacked in that I have it multi-threaded to use multiple drives and have it push the encoding into a forked process, so I can rip disks like crazy, and let the encoding catch up when it can. Plus, I use DISTMP3, which pushes the wav files over the network to other machines here to do the encoding to mp3. I had a 'ripping festival' about a month ago, with 8 dual p3 machines and a couple of athlons doing the encoding, and ripping from 4 scsi drives at the same time. Things did NOT take long.