I'm trying to rip music cds with Grip using my Plextor 16/10/40A, and it works, but very slowly (~6x), and makes the entire system basically unusable until its done. The effect feels exactly like having DMA turned off and trying to copy files from a cd, but DMA is turned on for the drive, and everything else on the computer. I get the same effect using cdda2wav as well as cdparanoia. I've tried a ton of different entries for generic scsi device and device name, but they give the exact same effect, or they cause it to not work at all. Any ideas?

Have you had a good look at all the otions for ripping, disable paranoia and disable extra paranoia while using the grip (cd paranoia) option works best for me.. I have always found the paranoia ripping engine to use lots of cpu and to be relatively slow. Turning off all those extras really speeds it up, at the expense of glitches on poor Cds.

I left all of the paranoia options turned off. I'm running a 1.333 Ghz Athlon with 512 RAM, so I should be able to rip cds smoothly, I always was able to in Win98 anyways. My DVD drive works with grip just fine, but rips even slower however (~2x), which is the same as in Windows.

I also tried just ripping the tracks (ie, not encoding them) and still got the same results.

I had the exact same problem. I have managed to get the CD's to rip
at 3x ` 5x by changing around some of the options.

First I configured the setup options in Grip as they explain step by step on this site:

http://linuxloader.com/modules.php?n...showpage&pid=2

I tried many other options such as ripping with (grip) cd paranoia and adding -XYZ to the beggining and unchecking the paranoid options, but the best configuration was the one described on the website above. I also noticed that the reason it was ripping so slow was because the CD i was ripping had a few scratches on it. I tried ripping a mint condition CD and it ripped much, much, much faster.

That may be your problem. Also I opened up a terminal window and typed "grip" to launch the program rather than going to multimedia -> sounds -> grip thru the gui. This improved performance for some reason.

I am ripping in mp3 format. If you plan to do the same make sure you have the package named lame-3.95.1-1plf.i586.rpm installed. It doesnt come on the installation CDs for licensing reasons. Mp3 is patented.

You can DL the god-dammed package at the link above.

Good Luck. If all else fails and you have Windows XP installed on another partition or hard-drive than you can rip and encode using windows and access the files in wondows thru Linux by going to /mnt/win c (Thats your windows hard drive" Linux can read ntfs!