I've heard good things about [link|http://homepage1.nifty.com/herumi/gogo_e.html|GOGO]. They've forked LAME and rewritten routines in assembly for speed.

I'm planning to check out the OS/2 port when I start encoding again. I had been using GRIP with LAME on my laptop's Linux partition to encode and discovered I've been running out of drive space during the rip/encode cycle. No out-of-disk-space errors popped up, so I never knew about it until I discovered some 30 second songs. I ended up with 2-3 short songs per CD, and even some missing songs. Grrr.