As I tend not to allow any of my home machines to connect to anything outside, CDDB was not an option for me. So as populating the tags was pretty much the bottleneck for me I did my collection this way:

Stack CD's next to PC in my study
Put CD in drive
Fill in data in AudioGrabber
Rip and encode (using LAME VBR 7 IIRC)
Have snack
Remove CD
Go to step 2 until done

Didn't take very long - about 8 minutes per CD. Since then as I only buy a couple of CD's at a time I do them there and then.

The only exceptions to this are new CD's my brother gets - I just take my empeg round and sync on his machine.

Audio quality is superb, file sizes are small (about 4Mb per song) and it's minimum effort (well, except for the typing, but I'm pretty fast)