From Grip to Sound Juicer

[Michael Wiktowy]

On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 1:13 PM, Francois <frmas at free.fr> wrote:
> Hi,
> Using Fedora 9, Grip no longer works on my system. I've switched to Sound
> Juicer and get *.flac files.
> Is there a tool to convert "flac" file to "mp3" files ? I do not want to
> produce mp3 files directly from sound juicer, as I can't find a way to tell
> it to produce 320 bitrate files; Thank you. Francois

I am not sure why you can't use Grip anymore. Runs fine on my F9 box.
I haven't tried encoding anything with it lately though ...

Regardless, with Sound Juicer it is more opaque to do but you should
certainly be able to change your mp3 encoding profile to produce
better output just as easily either by improving the default VBR
quality by changing the gst pipeline to be:

audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc mode=0
vbr-quality=0 ! id3v2mux

Strangely enough lower vbr-quality number is better ... I would think
a better name would be vbr-compression or something like that ... but
anyways ...

Also, if you want to use CBR at 320 kbps, use the following gst pipeline:

audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc mode=1
bitrate=320 ! id3v2mux

I tried that last one out and it seems to work fine. NB: Sound Juicer
needs to be closed and reopened in order to read in new profiles (and
possibly changes to gst pipelines) and have them available. I also had
problems with playing the CD through Sound Juicer and then trying to
rip it. It froze. If you just extract with SJ, it works.

GStreamer is extremely flexible but I haven't found a good reference
for putting together a sane pipeline and what kind of options each
segment has.

I got this info from the following post and linked screencast:
http://abock.org/2007/01/06/audio-profile-configuration-for-the-masses/

I am not sure why a handy pipeline editor like that isn't already
included in Sound Juicer.

/Mike