I am unaware of the existence of a program which makes the ripping of large groups of CDs easy. Currently, the standard procedure is to insert a CD, wait for it to rip, and then encode it to any of various formats. Then, the whole thing is repeated for the next CD. This becomes tedious quite fast, especially when you have a large collection of CDs.

Here's an idea which I think makes more sense: A program can be set to run so that it simply copies the CD in the drive onto the harddrive. Once it has finished, it pops open, and without having to confirm anything, the user can replace the copied CD with a new one and close it. The program does the same thing for this CD. It continues until the user tells it to stop. Then, after the CDs have been copied onto the harddrive, the program separates the CD images into wave files for each track, at which point it can be set to access a CDDB, or encode to MP3, or whatever.

It does depend on the reading speed of the drive, but this should get the things that the user has to be at the computer for finished quickly. Encoding doesn't require the person to be present. Just taking the CD image is the fastest way to get all of the data onto the computer (at least that's what seems to be the case to me). And a lot of people can afford this with 100+ gb harddrives.

If a program like this exists, what is it? If it doesn't exist yet, it should. But don't ask me to make it. I can't program.

All rippers should be able to encode after ripping each track (EAC, CDex).
Also the ripping speed is the limiting factor so I don't think you would get any time saving.

EAC has some switches to automate
see: http://www.digital-inn.de/showpost.php?p=48917&postcount=21
http://www.digital-inn.de/showpost.php?p=83902&postcount=34

or just read the whole thread:
http://www.digital-inn.de/showthread.php?t=15441

edit: new links

Audiograbber has a Continuous ripping feature.
More info here.

Exactly, on any resonably modern computer it should make little difference. The mass rip then later encode approach could probably give some good time savings if using an older computer, but remember that the storage requirements would also be greatly increased which is not all that "old computer" friendly.

at least from my experience not if you're using oggenc.

but flac encodes faster than the rip in EAC so you could rip every thing to flac then if for whatever reason you could transcode to whatever you wanted if you wanted to and have all your tagging etc.