Audacity saves the day
Or rather, the lady. A friend of ours, a Dutch composer, is going to give a series of lectures on the interaction between music and physics (the scientific discipline, I mean). She had carefully ripped 31 tracks from CD's, extracted the bits she wanted to use in her demonstration, and then lost everything.
Enter the audiocd io slave, audacity & k3b. In an hour and a half -- and it would have been less had not my laptop overheated after an hour -- we did the work that had taken her more than a day. Audacity is really stable and really fast nowadays. And while k3b initially crashed when I copied the tracks to an audiocd project, on a subsequent attempt it was on its best behaviour.
And everything was easy as pie... Once I had taken a few initial hurdles. First, audacity wouldn't run on SuSE because of some conflict with the installed GTK lib. Then, audacity being wxWidgets, and not a bona-fide KDE application, I couldn't easily use the audiocd:/ ioslave to load the files directly from CD into audacity. The "do you really want to junk everything you've done" dialogs must miss some window hint, because they never surface above the other audacity dialogs. And lastly, audiocd:/ telling me over and over again that the cd I was ripping was damaged a bit got old really soon, especially when it meant I couldn't do anything with the files on the desktop when that messagebox was playing hide-and-seek with my other windows.
But still, niggles aside, these three great applications did save the day.