Sunday, July 10, 2005

MP3 Rips With Sound-Juicer

Well, things work well when you get help:

A bit ago, I said that it seemed hard to get sound-juicer to rip CDs to MP3 format. But then, I got feedback from Ross Burton, the developer of sound-juicer, who told me to look for the gstreamer-lame plugin to handle MP3 files.

This took a bit of detective work: Mandrake has the plugin under that name in the Penguin Liberation Front archives, but the dependencies to install it weren't compatible with Fedora's shipped version of gstreamer. Eventually, I thought to look in the the list of available RPMs for Fedora Core 4. Doing
$ yum list > yum_files
and then looking at the output, I found the line:
gstreamer-plugins-mp3.i386  0.8.8-0.lvn.1.4  livna
which looked promising. (The program is in the Livna repository, which is I installed with help from Fedora Core Tips & Tricks.) So install the package via:
$ sudo yum install gstreamer-plugins-mp3
and off to the sound-juicer manual to learn how to add MP3 ripping capabilities:

  1. Run the program gnome-audio-profiles-properties
    1. Press "New" to get a create a new profile, then "Edit"
    2. Name it MP3
    3. In the box labeled "GStreamer Pipeline" enter:
      audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc
    4. Fill in the "File Extension" box with "mp3"
    5. Click the "active" check box
    6. Exit
  2. Start up sound-juicer
  3. Under "Edit=>Preferences" go to Output: and select "MP3"
  4. Rip normally

And this works: except that I get error messages of the type
Couldn't find matching gstreamer tag for track-count
Couldn't find matching gstreamer tag for encoder
Couldn't find matching gstreamer tag for encoder-version
for every track, and at the end sound-juicer hung up and I had to kill it manually. We'll see if this problem persists.

Anyway, thanks again to Ross Burton for helping out.

1 comments:

rcjhawk said...

I should add that I think I know why sound-juicer hung at the end of that run: When sound-juicer exits, it pops up a window asking if you want to eject the disk. If that window gets hidden, then the whole program appears to freeze, while in reality it's just waiting for me to tell it what to do. I typically run the FVWM window manager with a 3x3 virtual desktop, with Evolution, Firefox, and emacs each filling a full screen. There's a LOT of places for a pop-up window to hide.