FWIW BonkEnc (new to me) is a free audio converter and CD ripper which is currently well-regarded. Could be worth a look.

Yep, EAC is the best ripper-- especially if you have a scratched CD. Other free tools like CDex and Audiograbber reportedly get the job done as well.

...as long as the CDs aren't scratched or copy-protected, in which case I don't think you should use anything besides EAC or dBpoweramp.

AudioGrabber freeware? Last time I used it, it was commercial... and used the sucky XING engine. Or am I thinking about something else with a similar name?

Personally, I never had any reason to use anything other than EAC with its superior secure ripping mode. I'll take a look at dBpoweramp as well.

EAC's ripping is secure, but I dunno if I'd call it superior - it works by re-ripping each sector multiple times, which strains your drive and can be slow. dBpoweramp utilizes C2 error pointer information, which means it only has to re-rip sectors the drive tells it were ripped problematically - and it does this in a second pass, so the first pass can go full speed (re-ripping a sector means searching back, which is a pretty slow operation). Unfortunately, not all drives support C2, and some that do don't support it reliably :/