I’ve been using Sound Juicer in previous Ubuntu releases to rip my CD’s and encode them as CD quality mp3’s for a while now so I can retain my one legal backup copy of them. When I did a fresh install of Gutsy however, I suddenly could not rip CD’s to mp3 formats. This was critical for me to accomplish for two reasons. First, most of my music players only work with mp3’s and second, a friend was in desperate need of Vivaldi.

With so much at stake, I cracked my knuckles, hit my second brain and figured out how to get this working.

First, you need to enable your multiverse repositories. If you’re a bit unsure as to how to do that, see this article.

Now, let’s make sure Sound Juicer is installed. Go to System-> Administration-> Synaptic Package Manager. Once this is open, search for sound juicer. If it’s not installed, mark it for installation. also search for lame and make sure that the lame encoder is installed. If not, install them and then exit out of Synaptic.

Next, open up a terminal session (Applications-> Accessories-> Terminal) and put the following in there to install one much needed package:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse

Once you’ve got that installed, insert a music cd. Open Sound Juicer and go to Edit-> Preferences.

Click the Edit Profiles button and find the CD Quality MP3 profile and edit that. Make sure the Active check box is checked off.

If that’s not available, then create a new profile called “MP3″.

In the pipeline box, cut and paste this:

audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc bitrate=128

Make sure that profile is Active and save it. You’ll have to restart Sound Juicer but when you do, you should be able to rip music and encode it to mp3 format.