timothy's Journal: Making SoundJuicer do what I want ...

I like Gnome, and I like quite well the Gnome-ness (intentional simplicity, user-friendliness) of most Gnome apps. I also know that very little in life is actually perfect, but I still carp and moan about things that aren't perfect. In that light: SoundJuicer, the Gnome CD ripping program, has two flaws that really bug me and required some googling to resolve. Neither took long to fix to my satisfaction, but in case this is useful to you, or me when I forget these things and want to do the same on a different computer or installation ...

(Both of these apply to SoundJuicer as installed via apt-get on Ubuntu 9.10 alpha, and the fixes are as of the date of this posting -- I make no claim as to universality of my complaints or solutions ;))

1) MP3 support not included by default, for reasons that are sadly understandable. So I realize this is not a "flaw" from the developers' point of view, only from the user's. To fix this, a rather cool web site will let you install the right codecs with a click, and as far as I know or suspect, is not simultaneously causing your flowers to wilt, hair to recede, nose to fall off, etc. (I found this site when I was still using SoundConverter, before I realized that SoundJuicer could in fact be used to go straight from CD to MP3.)

2) The process for adding a new profile (collection of settings that affect the output format and quality of ripped tracks) is not as clear as it could be for a user as naive as am I, and in fact seems to me downright opaque.

I wanted an even lower quality setting than the "low quality" option, which has a target bitrate of 128mbps. (Actually, I just wanted a smaller size, and for spoken stuff like audio books, the resulting lower quality is perfectly listenable to me.) To achieve this:

a) In SoundJuicer, Go to Edit / Preferences. Click on "Edit Profiles" (Just above the Close button, in the lower right-hand corner), then click "New" in the box that pops up, and give your new profile a name in the next box that pops up, titled Edit Gnome Audio Profiles. (I called my new profile "mp3-64.") After you assign a name, the name of your new profile (not yet complete) will show up on the list of available profiles. This is not especially intuitive (at least for me), but take heart: You're almost done!

b) Now, click once on the name of your new profile to highlight it, then click on the Edit button. Yet another little dialogue box appears, but there are only two fields you need to worry about within it, which are the ones labeled "Gstreamer pipeline" and "file extension."

For the field labeled "Gstreamer pipeline," to get the combination I wanted (namely, a stereo MP3 at 64kbps), the following line works for me and I hope does for you as well:

audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc vbr=0 bitrate=64

I would even have gone with 32kpbs (which would be the same line as above, but with "32" at the end instead of "64," where it says "bitrate=64"), except I understand that some players have trouble playing such low bitrates, and at current storage prices, it's not worth the trade-off.

For the "file extension" format, put in "mp3." Not sure if it's necessary, but it's not really worth the time to explore deeply. Put it in, and enjoy life.

Now, my biggest complaint (and the most serious) I suspect is at least mostly the fault of my hardware rather than anything about SoundJuicer or Gstreamer, which is that I've found that some of the tracks thus created have some serious audio glitches; most of them are small, but a few tracks are basically unlistenable. Might be fully the fault of Gstreamer, but I choose right now to say it's because of a combination of imperfect disks, aging optical drive, low RAM, and cosmic rays -- using SoundJuicer on other machines convinces me that SJ itself is quite competent.