Let's go through the process of ripping a CD as an example. From a command-line prompt (indicated by '%'), run:
% cdda2track
This will access your CD and extract all the audio files on it into the default audio format. Assuming one hasn't changed the default format, this results in files named 'track01.wav', 'track02.wav' and so forth.
But if you wanted MP3 files, there's more work to be done.
% track2track -t mp3 *.wav
will convert those .wav files to MP3 files (indicated by the -t mp3 flag which tells the program what file type we want). Unfortunately, that gives us raw, untagged MP3s without names.
However, if we indicate the MP3 format when ripping, via:
% cdda2track -t mp3
cdda2track will automatically perform a lookup of CD information from MusicBrainz and FreeDB, tag newly created tracks with that information and give them appropriate filenames such as "01 - First Track.mp3", "02 - Second Track.mp3" and so on.
Lossless audio is just as easy to work with. Creating FLAC files from a CD is a almost identical:
% cdda2track -t flac
But since FLAC files are pretty big, you might want to convert them for portable use:
% track2track -t mp3 *.flac
Unlike going from .wav to .mp3, these FLAC files are already tagged with information take from the MP3 files.