Can someone please point me in the right direction for learning how to rip and encode mp3's (lame) from a CLI? I had found a killer tutorial awhile back, but can't find it for the life of me now. I already tried google, man cdparanoia and a few of the HOWTO's but haven't figured it out yet. Google seems to return a MILLION of the same results: some perl script. I want to know how to do it manually. Grip seems to be a pain in the ass to install on Slack 9 running Dropline-Gnome with 2.4.22 so I would rather just do it from the command line.

Thanks!

man lame

Will give you oodles of info. You'll probably find

lame --preset help

to be more helpful, at least at first. it tells you about the presets which are supposted to as optimized as possible. At the very least, you can start producing very nice quality rips with the presets.

Edit: Oh, I should point out that lame (I'm pretty sure) does not decode tracks from a cd, so you'll probably have to team lame up with something like cdda2wav.

I was thinking I would use cdparanoia to rip from the cd to wav, then lame to encode to mp3, but I can't seem to get cdparanoia to work from the cli. I am missing something...

I haven't done this myself but judging from man cdparanoia, it seems pretty straightforward. What exactly goes wrong when you try using cdparanoia from the command line?

Ok. It might be a problem unrelated to cdparanoia. Check this out:
root@dabasement:/home/scruff# mount /dev/cdrom
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/cdrom,
or too many mounted file systems
root@dabasement:/home/scruff# xmms /mnt/cdrom
(plays cd just fine)
root@dabasement:/home/scruff# umount /dev/cdrom
umount: /dev/cdrom: not mounted
It acts like the cd is unmountable, yet I can play it in xmms....

knowing that the audio cd is at /mnt/cdrom, can you give me a sample command to start the rip? maybe I am not using it correctly. I tried several different methods, but I'm not entirely sure any of them are correct.

audio cds cannot be mounted. Just run cdparanoia without mounting the CD. It should work.

also, do take a look at
man cdparanoia
it gives a few examples.