Ripping Audio CDs
I’ve recently decided to rip all my Audio CDs, as I was only listening to them using Amarok on my PC and it was getting really difficult to manage my entire collection.
I tried several ripping software from Grip to Rubyripper and k3b but neither of them worked out of the box. There were issues with CDROM detection, ripping and/or encoding options not being detected as valid options for the encoder etc.
I was trying to convert Audio CDs to MP3 format using a high CBR of 320kbps. For that I needed lame MP3 encoder which was supported by all the above software.
I finally found Sound Juicer was the easiest to use for this purpose. It is available with almost every recent Linux distribution, it’s GNOME based and it has a very simple interface.
The following easy steps are required:
- insert Audio CD
- open Sound Juicer
- go to Edit –> Preferences
- choose CD Quality, MP3 (.mp3 type) under Format
- click Edit Profiles and select CD Quality, MP3 then click Edit
- replace the default GStreamer pipeline with this line:
audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc vbr=0 bitrate=320 ! id3v2mux
- close all Preferences windows and click Extract
The resulting MP3 files are larger in size than VBR files.
