What kind of SCSI adapter do you have? With the same drive under Win2K I start a CD at about 17x and finish at nearly 40x. Also using AG 1.81

BTW, set your AG up to only rip to WAV and put ID tags in the WAV. Do all your MP3 encoding batch whenever your computer will be free (during the night, during the day while at work/school...) This is about the fastest way to grab all your music. I would rip about 30GB of WAV files and then before leaving for work in the morning, I'd drop them onto AG. This would then create the proper folder structure (according to the rules set in AG), proper ID3 tags as well as delete the original WAV files (this is an option you can disable on the popup window when you start the batch process).

Before using any of the LAME presets, go to the websites responsible for those presets. www.r3mix.net will tell you all about the r3mix VBR preset and show you exactly what lame commands it's made up of. Read the help files to know what each command option does. Then make a few files with different settings for your own listening test.

Do this all before starting your mass-encoding and you'll save yourself a LOT of re-encoding.

Bruno