I have used Grip since Suse 9.0, and have yet to find a reason to switch.
I use Grip, although I’ve had a few problems with it randomly dropping the odd track from a CD - setting the pause-between-tracks option fixes this for my hardware.
I’d love to use the audiocd:/ option, but can’t get the FLAC virtual folder to appear any more although I’ve all the obvious libraries loaded. Worked under KDE3 until recently, then stopped; has never worked under 4.2
I’ve been using CDex ever, but as I’m moving to Linux GRIP seems more indicated. However, for my needs I’m afraid GRIP borders on junk. It claims that it supports unicode, and tags in config are set to UTF-8, and yet whenever there is a special character like ä é è ç or even en-dash, it shows as total garbage (ie. ä = ä) in nearly any application! Sadly this is abandonware, just like CDex.
I tried k3b. Looks interesting as it allows for a local cddb (for me this is vital). It crashes badly for mp3, but not ogg…
I tried sound-juicer and ripperx: ridiculous.
rubyripper seems interesting, but where can you find an rpm with it’s gui?
(1) I used to use CDex, too, during my Windows days, and I’ve found Audex a more than adequate replacement. It’s in the repositories (check Webpin)
(2) K3b is, in my opinion, excellent all-way-round, and it’s certainly an excellent and easy-to-use CD ripper as well.
You mentioned that it crashes when trying to rip mp3; might be an issue with the mp3 encoder rather than K3b itself (because of the country-specific legal limitations on mp3 you would want to make sure, for example, that you are using the right mp3 encoder package – usually, they are found in the Packman repository)
(3) There are a couple of rpm search sites on the net, one for example being About Rpmfind.Net WWW Server a.k.a. Rufus.W3.Org. Perhaps you can find a rpm package for rubyripper there. I haven’t used rubyripper yet and hence are not familiar with the installation procedure; possibly, however, you can simply download the right packages from their website (or, at least, inquire there about rpm packages).
(4) … perhaps on a side note, you might want to bear in mind that Linux and its applications are created and maintained by volunteers. There are many fantastic applications and in my own humble opinion, most of the time Linux far outstrips comparable for-purchase software equivalents on other OS’s (which, given its not-for-profit nature, is really extraordinary), but one has to make allowances and not expect ready-made ‘perfect’ solutions. That being said, I’ve found that if one invests little bit of time, one can usually get most things fixed via help & advice from forums and the developers … 