grip is a CD player and an audio ripper: it can play CDs, extract audio from CDs, save it in WAV files, and convert the files to MP3s. It has extensive built-in help and fairly intuitive controls.

grip hasn’t been updated in quite a while (though it’s very good), so if you prefer a program that’s still maintained, check out Sound Juicer (http://burtonini.com/blog/computers/sound-juicer/) or KAudioCreator (http://www.kde.org/applications/multimedia/kaudiocreator/).