I haven't ripped any music for a while (getting my new computer set up). On the old machine, running Linux, I ran grip + lame and everything worked quite well.

On the new machine, I'm running Win2000 and I just spent the $20 on Audiograbber. I also have a snazzy Plextor 16/10/40A IDE CD-RW drive that allegedly does audo extraction at the full 40X. In practice, I'll get audio extraction at somewhere between 20 and 30x, and then lame (with the r3mix flags) runs at between 8x and 10x speed (on my 1GHz Athlon).

However...

My machine occasionally decides to just hang. Freeze. Hit the reset button. The problem seems related to the Plextor drive because when I switch to using my Toshiba DVD-ROM drive, everything works flawlessly (albeit much slower than the Plextor). I even upgraded my Plextor firmware to the latest release. No effect.

Anybody else had problems like this? Could my Plextor drive be flakey?

Also, of all the Windows extraction tools I've tried, they all pale in comparison to grip on Linux. grip is smart enough to run lame on the previous track while extracting the current one, and it has a GUI that doesn't drive you completely batty (unlike AudioGrabber which just gets all confused when CDDB hasn't heard of your CD). It's almost enough to make me want to set the machine up to dual boot -- purely to run grip. I actually tried running grip on Linux through VMware, but it turned out that audio extraction just doesn't seem to work that way at all. *sigh*