Ripping CDs on Ubuntu

We want to convert our CD collection to flac so that we can free up some shelf space, and so that we have a backup of some of the more obscure CDs.  I did a trail rip on my fit-pc2 to see how long it took to rip an album and find a ripper I liked. The winner was Audex as it copes gracefully with problems and for configurable file naming.

Rhythmbox
There wasn't a dedicated ripper installed so I tried  Rhythmbox first.  It ripped a couple of tracks of Burn Out fairly quickly, but then got stuck about 15% of the way through track 3.  The percentage complete did continue going up, but painfully slowly. I couldn't see any way of cancelling the rip other than ejecting the CD or exiting the program.

Sound Juicer
Sound Juicer is Ubuntu's default CD-ripping application, but it wasn't installed on my box. I installed it and checked the settings and it was set to rip to flac. I tried ripping the same CD again and ripping progressed quickly, but it was ripping as ogg. I checked the settings and it still said flac, so I changed it to ogg and back to flac and then tried again. This time it did rip as flac, but again it hung on the 3rd track.

Asunder
The Ubuntu Documentation described Asunder as "an easy-to-use, plain CD ripper" which sounded good, so I tried that next. It ripped and then encoded as both ogg and flac. Again it got stuck on track 3. It has a nice progress indicator that shows the progress ripping and encoding. This that it showed that it hadn't finished ripping the track when it hung, so it looks like it's ripping rather than encoding which is the problem.

Audex
I wasn't totally happy with any of the rippers I'd tried so I used Ubuntu Software Centre to see what else was available and found Audex. It looks nice and it was obvious how edit the settings. I sett it going and again it got stuck on track 3, but brought up a dialog box telling me that ripping performance had been poor for the last 5 minutes, and asked me if I wanted to continue. I said selected continue, and it continued ripping extremely slowly. It has ripped a number of CDs without any problems; we've now finished 'A' with only a couple of CDs which ripped in less than realtime.

Update January 2012 - Audex passed a long term use test as we're still using it after ripping most of our CD collection.