Increasing Ripping Performance

If you are using an IDE CDrom drive, using SCSI emulation can give a significant performance increase. Apparently, dma is not used by the IDE driver (at least in 2.4 kernels). To enable SCSI emulation, add "hdx=ide-scsi" (where the "x" in "hdx" is is replaced with the appropriate letter for your CDRom device) to end of the "kernel" line in /etc/grub.conf (if you are using grub), or as a line after "root=/dev/something" in /etc/lilo.conf (if you are using lilo)

You can also disable paranoia to get approximately a 2x speedup. This is not recommended, however, unless you are very confident in the ability of your drive to do rock-solid CDDA extraction (or unles you enjoy having pops in your audio)