The desktop beyond F10

[Nicu Buculei]

Dan Winship wrote:
> But am I wrong in believing that MP3 is the de facto standard compressed
> audio format? And that many people have devices that play MP3s but not
> oggs? And that when people say "rip", it's generally assumed they mean
> "rip to mp3" unless they explicitly name another file format?

Some years ago I used to use grip, which has two buttons, one for "rip" 
and another for "rip + encode". Yes, at the very first use I was 
confused a bit that "rip" produced a .wav file, but I understood the 
process.

> If so, then Rhythmbox (or actually, Sound Juicer, right?) has bad
> confusing UI, because it doesn't support MP3, but it never acknowledges
> this fact anywhere, leaving the user to assume that it does. (Even I get
> confused, and I *know* Fedora can't ship MP3 support.)

But Sound Juicer does support MP3. Not out-of-the-box, but after the 
first step I do after any install.

> If our use cases for the "Default CD ripper" feature assume that some
> people are going to want to rip to MP3 (which I assume they will), and
> our CD ripping tool is not going to support MP3 (which I assume it
> won't), then the UI ought to be a lot more explicit about this, and make
> sure that the user isn't going to waste their time ripping CDs into a
> format they can't use.

It would be interesting to gather some hard data about how many people 
rip to mp3, ogg, flac and wav, but I suspect we don't have a clean way 
to get this data.

-- 
nicu :: http://nicubunu.ro :: http://nicubunu.blogspot.com
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