EDIT 2: $5 on Amazon? That's in my impulse-buy range, but it's hard to tell how long that cable is from the photo.
3'; works great right out of the box. Or envelope and series of plastic bags, but...$5 and it works great. (Pity it showed up the day the NPR fund drive ended.)
The FLAC project continues apace; won't be done by the time I head to Tucson on Friday but it's getting there.
KDE has, built-in, the most fucking beautiful CD-ripping interface I have ever seen. You point your filebrowser to audiocd:/ and it has subdirectories for MP3, Ogg, FLAC, and so on; you can drag-and-drop tracks in the appropriate format from its respective folder. Encoding and metadata are taken care of automatically.
Trouble is that it doesn't actually seem to WORK very well; it very frequently hangs on ripping tracks at the end of an album. Now, this could be because I am ripping from burned CD's that have been sitting in my car for 5 Phoenix summers, but even considering that it seems like an incredibly high failure rate.
(Also I just accidentally copied a file over as WAV and it went just fine and now I'm trying to copy it as a FLAC and it won't go, so yeah, definitely not the CD that's the problem.)