The distmp3 package contains a client, distmp3, and a daemon, distmp3host, which can be installed on many machines to provide fast distributed encoding of music (typically from a CD-ripper or batch script) using an encoder of your choice - usually MP3, Ogg Vorbis, or flac.

abcde is one such CD ripper wrapper which has builtin support for distmp3 and can use it very efficiently, especially in the case where the machine with the best CD-ROM drive is unable to encode the extracted audio at a satisfactory speed.

The current tradeoff is that the client may not pass command-line arguments to the encoder being run on the machines running the distmp3hosts.