CD Paranoia is the only REALLY good cd ripper in Linux to my knowledge. Unfortunately, there are two problems I have with it.

1. It's SLOOOOOOOOWWW - It has to be the only ripping program I've used that appears to go SLOWER than real time (especially if there are glitches).
2. No CDDB/Freedb support in normal shell - I could write a simple script to aid in utilizing given CDDB information, but I have no idea how to actually get said information.

Is there any solution for me that doesn't involve installing Xwindows?

It should not be slow at all, do you have DMA enabled on your drive, if not it will use a lot of CPU power and also rip very slow. What is your drive as well.

On the issue of naming tracks without using a gui, try out the abcde front-end, it is text only, offers cddb and multiple codecs. heres a link: http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/ There may be better ones but this will do the job.

Kristian

Best solution is : do your ripping in Windows then access those files through linux. If you use Windows you can use CDDB2 info which is more accurate and complete in general than FreeDB using Player (you can export/import the information through the cdplayer.ini for use in EAC). That's so useful for classical or rare recordings.

AFAIK DMA won't be used at all when ripping audio CDs on GNU/Linux, even when you explicitly enabled DMA for your CD-ROM drive it won't be used. These problems should be gone in Linux 2.6, that release will have a real implementation of ATAPI.

Well, my CD-ROM is a SCSI drive, so I don't believe I can enable DMA on it. I don't know who made it though.

I already have a working solution in Windows, but I'm trying to get a solution working in Linux so that I can write a guide about how to rip a CD in Linux (ironic, eh?).

As is, my Linux box also acts as my router. But it's can take a decent load (dual PIII/550), so I'm not sure why it's so slow. It was slow even before it became my router.

I'll give abcde a shot when I get a chance (a bit busy this weekend already though )

I've found that (using cdparanoia), I have to tell it not to use maximum speed on my Ultraplex. If it rips 3 or 4 cds in a row, it gets hot then throttles itself down to very slow speeds and has quite a few read errors. If I let it rest a couple minutes, it will start flying. My Plexwriter (12/10/32) doesn't do this, and generally rips faster all the time. Both are SCSI.

As far as automatic naming, the cdparanoia folks decided to leave that sort of thing to people who write front ends for it. I've been working on a program that could serve your needs exactly. It rips using cdparanoia, then encodes to either flac, mp3, mpc, ogg or just wav files and names/tags them according to freedb information in a fully automated fashion. It's not quite ready for public consumption, but if you're willing to be a guinea pig^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H beta tester, I can send you a copy.

maybe you need change the NICE for cdparanoia, give it a value of -20 (as root). i have no problems getting decent speed.
have you tried cdda2wav, inplace of cdparanoia?

check out dekagen;
"The dekagen bourne shell script, formerly known as ripenc, is an interactive command line tool, that automates the whole process of ripping data from music compact discs (CD), the naming of the files, their converting into MP3 or Ogg-Vorbis format and the labelling of the MP3 files with an ID3 tag. ..... To avoid manual naming and tagging for all the files, cda, which comes within the xmcd package, is used for CDDB lookups"

http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~mbayer/tools...ls/dekagen.html

or CDFS, just "drag n drop" off the wav files, no ripping needed.
http://www.elis.rug.ac.be/~ronsse/cdfs/
then there is Jack
http://www.home.unix-ag.org/arne/jack/

also for accessing the CDDB you might want to use the perl::CDDB module

if you need, you can install X without all the bloated Desktops, (KDE, GNOME) and just stick with the standard XDM & X11. not pretty but might give you alittle something more.