Best CD drive for ripping audio?

[KevinO]

"Shawn T. Rutledge" wrote:
.... I want to set up a script so if I put an audio
> disc in that drive it goes ahead and rips it.

I use grip. It can go out and grab your disk info from a CDDB server and
use the information for
file/directory names, playlist files and id tags if you're making mp3s.
It's very handy and very configurable.
Grip is a gui app that comes with Mandrake 7.2 and probably others. It
is a front-end for all of the standard command line tools ( cdda2wav,
cdparanoia, blade, etc.). It will rip and encode at the same time if you
want it to.

> Which encoder do you use? 

I use gogo for an encoder at 192 kbps. It seems a good compromise
between file size and quality for me. Gogo is an assembly optimized
version of lame so it runs VERY FAST. Gogo will also use multiple
processors if you've got em. Lame is an improved sounding version of
blade. So with gogo you will get both the best speed and sound.

I let grip rip and encode a few disks and then run rsync over ssh to get
the mp3s onto my webserver. I run edna which is a real nice way to serve
the files up to any machine with a browser. My encoder almost keeps up
with the ripping on this box with both running at the same time ! When
the first track is ripped and it starts to rip the second one, encoding
begins on track one right behind it.

Feel free to contact me off list if you need help finding any of these !

-- 
Kevin O'Connor

She can kill all your files;
She can freeze with a frown.
And a wave of her hand brings the whole system down.
And she works on her code until ten after three.
She lives like a bat but she's always a hacker to me.
                -- Apologies to Billy Joel