I use grip and if you have the restricted codecs installed it should be easy to
get going.
ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php
Some people perfer amrok for file mp3's and such.
If you use grip to rip CD's is pretty fast and it will make a folder with the
band name on it and tittle. It depends how the pressing format was done. I rip
CD's and there was no tittle format on the CD. Inside the folder will be
01-song name
02-song name
and so on.
If you view your folder as a list you can copy and past them into calc. WARNING
you must set the colums before you complete the past. It will prompt you and
you'll see what I mean. If you do not set the the colums it will mash them up
together.

Why Grip over the default SoundJuicer?

I happen to like grip over SJ. It just my preference.

Why not Ogg Vorbis instead of Fraunhofer's .mp3.

I can't speak for anyone else on on this list but for me, I have to do
MP3 because my personal music player can only decode MP2 & WMA
formats. I'm not going to rip my collection twice. If I were going to
only use the files on my Ubuntu system for DJing, Ogg would probably
be a better option

Ogg is good open source alternative to MP3. Lot of the media rippers on Linux
will default to Ogg. However, if you DJ and need to burn tracks on a CD, and
spin the CD on a house system. You as you know going to require a MP3 format. If
you use your Lap Top to DJ with you can use Ogg with no problem. Ogg is a very
hard sell to makers of multi media devices. Yet, it is growing. Why pay money
for some thing when you can get it for free. I support open source, but when
your multi media player only supports MP3 and WMA. There is little choice.

I would like to clarify that the MP3s are not for the house system.
What I'll be doing is ripping my entire collection to MP3 and burning
them to DVDs and then depending on the DJ gig, I'll copy the
appropriate DVDs to the hard drive on my laptop and DJ from there. I
have all the necessary sound equipment and won't be plugging in to
anything owned by the house except for the power outlet. :)

I will also be copying some of those same MP3s to my portable player
on occasion, thus the need for MP3 instead of OGG.

I have not been umpressed with sound juicer and even grip. I'm a fan
of ripperx. Its in the add/remove section. I had the restricted
drivers installed before I installed ripperx so I never worried about
codecs. I found that ripperx was pretty good about finding the album
art using the cddb. I also liked the reliability it gave me. You can
play with all kinds of setting in the gui to get just the quality you
are looking for.

I have looked at a few IDE programs and have not found one that I like
as of yet. If anyone has some feed back on that I would love to hear
it. Does anyone know of a program that with get the album cover
artwork for a track?

I use AlbumArt 1.6; the author has taken his site down now.

The app was here:
http://kempele.fi/~skyostil/projects/albumart/

There is a Tip posted on our local LUG's website here:
http://hllug.org/index.php?topic=LinuxTips

It works in in Ubuntu 7.10 with the change mentioned in the above Tip.

Ogg Vorbis is open source and free software. They've done an amazing job.
Some say that it's better than .mp3. You can control the amount of
ompression vs. quality.