Ubuntu: Changing the Bit Rate in Sound Juicer

While I am a strong supporter of Open Source and love that there is the offer of using Ogg Vorbis to encode my audio files, I own two different MP3 players. The first is a 1 gigabyte unit from Nextar, model number MA933A, which once formatted under Windows allows for playing the ogg format. The second is an older CD style MP3 player, playing both MP3 CDs as well as standard CDs and does not support the ogg format. In order to allow for greatest usage, I use the MP3 format for my audio.

Sound Juicer is the CD extractor program I have been using for sometime and once it is setup to handle encoding to the MP3 format, it is usable. However, by default it wants to encode using a variable bit rate. I much prefer using a constant bit rate, set at 160kbps. So, we need to tell Sound Juicer to change the bit rate.

Changing the Bit Rate in Sound Juicer

From the Edit menu, select Preferences. In the Format section at the bottom of the window, select CD Quality, MP3 (.mp3 type) from the drop down menu. Click Edit Profiles...

From the Profiles list, choose CD Quality, MP3 and click Edit. You will see the profile name, profile description, gstreamer pipeline, and file extension. We will be replacing the Gstreamer pipeline.

The default gstreamer pipe is as follows:

audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc mode=0vbr-quality=6 ! id3v2mux

We will focus on the two items in bold. The first one, mode=0, sets the output to stereo. I left this set to stereo mode.

The second item sets the output to use a variable bit rate, which it seems can range from 0-9, with 9 being the lowest quality. So six is a bit on the lower end which seems to yield around a 128kbps file.

To yield a constant bit rate of 160kbps, I replaced the vbr-quality=6 to bitrate=160. So the end results are:

audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc mode=0bitrate=160 ! id3v2mux

Once you have replaced the Gstreamer pipe, click Close. You will click 3 close buttons to get back to the main sound juicer window. Now when you extract a CD, it will be extracted as 160Kbps MP3 files.

Source:

I issued the command gst-inspect-0.10 lame in a terminal window to find out what mode=0 and vbr-quality=6 were and to find out the bit rate command.