Software: Ripping MP3s in Ubuntu

Out of the box, neither Ubuntu or Fedora support ripping audio CDs to MP3. This is because MP3 is not royalty free, unlike OGG, or FLAC. Buying music online at the moment seems a waste of time, as it usually costs the same price as buying the CD, and comes in lower quality. My personal preference is to just buy the CD and rip it myself, giving me the option of what format and what quality to use.

Ubuntu comes with Sound Juicer installed, which is a very capable ripper. To get MP3 support in this, I installed the "ubuntu-restricted-extras" package, which amongst other things, such as Sun Java and Microsoft Fonts, installs MP3 support for Sound Juicer, via the Gstreamer packages.

I find most people's idea of "CD Quality MP3" to be a little on the low side, so I like to change the settings slightly. Adjusting the settings to the lame encoder is pretty easy, but the format is slightly different from just using LAME at the command line. As we are going through Gstreamer, we follow its own rules. To see all available settings, use "gst-inspect-0.10 lame", depending of course on your version of Gstreamer.

I used the following setting, which gives me 96-320kbps VBR MP3 files.

Once this is changed, you have to close Sound Juicer and re-open it for the new, or adjusted profile to show up.

Ripping my latest purchase, IAMX - Kiss + Swallow (review coming soon), took a minute (if that) and took up 81.7MB. A perfect size for an album.

You got it working then