Oh Baby !, the latest a-release of FRE:AC with multi-threaded encoding rocks the llama's ass.
Fast & furious, highly configurable & free, comes in Windows and Linux flavors, too !
For the uninitiated:
fre:ac is a free audio converter and CD ripper/audio CD grabber with support for various popular formats and encoders. It currently converts between MP3, MP4/M4A, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, WAV, and Bonk formats and features full Unicode support, including support for UTF-8 freedb entries.
Has anti-jitter, all flavors of CD-Paranoia super-ripping, and excellent CDDA / auto-metadata support