Back in the day, there was grip. It had a complicated, somewhat ugly UI, but everything was configurable and, generally, it worked. Then it was abandoned.

Now, there are all sorts of tools, but finding one that has reasonable configurability (please let me provide the command line for lame ... that's all I ask!) has been a multi-year frustration. I guess I understand the desire to keep things simple, but surely somebody else out there wants to use "--preset extreme". Grip also had a neat system for handling special characters in track names (ripped any Sigur Rós or múm albums?) that I've not seen in other tools.

Here are the ones I've tried:

• abcde — painful "ui", irritating and tricky to deal with when CDDB has no data, but it is configurable and overall it's the best of the lot (amazingly)


• asunder — cannot configure lame options, doesn't act unix-y w.r.t. configuration options (eg paths with leading slashes aren't considered absolute)


• ripperx — more configurable, in that it allows "extra" options to lame, confusing UI, documentation way out of date


• sound-juicer — Ubuntu docs warn people away due to some gstreamer problems


• rubyripper — tried this and hated it for reasons I can't recall now, and it's not in the repositories anyway


• banshee — inadequate configuation options, wretched iTunes-like UI (I'm probably a minority in that view), sluggish and bloated

I haven't tried the KDE tools.

Is my basic problem that I'm living in the past here? Is there some awesome ripper/encoder in the repository that cleverly evades searches via synaptic?