Sound Juicer Workaround Finally Allows Ripping to MP3!
Although I am a big fan of the Gnome Desktop, there are few glitches here and there that sometimes bother me. One such annoyance is that Gnome’s default CD ripper known as “Sound Juicer” does not appear to come with built in mp3 support. It does rip to flac and ogg though. While I do realize that some people use these formats, mp3 is still by far the most common audio compression filetype for the regular user so it absolutely perplexes me why the powers that be would not incorporate mp3 ripping support into this application. I read through some different threads on the net and some of them blame the user in the sense that gst-register was not run or that mp3 support packages were not installed. While these are slight factors (especially the latter), the major issue still remains even after these tasks are performed. I ended up finding a solution to this issue which requires some user patchwork but it is really straightforward.
I do have to give credit to the people on the Fedora Forums where I found this workaround. I will be using my own screenshots to show how to add mp3 to Sound Juicer. First, you need to open Sound Juicer, then click on Edit and then Preferences which will get you a new window. From here you can click on the Edit Profiles buttons and then New. The information you enter here will be up to you, but I set mine up with one new entry for a constant (not variable) bitrate of 128 kb/s for my PSP and another one for CD Rips I might do where I want to preserve a good amount of quality which I set to a bitrate of 192 kb/s. You may want to set yours up differently and that’s fine, please feel free to check out the guide for using the proper command syntax at the HydrogenAudio Lame Wiki.
It’s great to have this workaround, but what about adding it to the application itself? I have been using RipperX for a long time because of this but I will try out Sound Juicer now that it functions more like an actual cd ripper.