In EAC, the FLAC encoding seems unusually fast for me. It rips to WAV normally, then in the FLAC.exe window it only takes 3 seconds for a 3 minute track. It takes about 5 times longer for LAME MP3. I'm not sure if that's normal.
Command-line options:
-T "artist=%artist%" -T "title=%title%" -T "album=%albumtitle%" -T "date=%year%" -T "tracknumber=%tracknr%" -T "genre=%genre%" -5 %source%
That sounds about right. Lossless encoding is generally much faster than lossy.
It may feel counter-intuitive but it is much easier to encode lossless than lossy. The challenge is to encode to much smaller sizes than lossless could ever achieve and make it still sound good. That is why your MP3 encoder takes longer, it's much harder.
That makes sense, thanks.