Ubuntu 6.10, Rythmbox and Sound Juicer: Enabling MP3 Ripping

First, a hint about setting up sound. This HowTo is very helpful. The only thing I had to do was double-click on the speaker icon in the upper right and then move the PCM volume up. Until I did that I got no sound output. I found putting the PCM level at about 1/3rd of max worked out about right.

This thread and this help page were useful to figuring this out. Ultimately brian g's post at the end of this thread gave me the right GStreamer encoding stream. What's below is what worked for me taken from all of those postings.

1. If you haven't already done so, make sure you have gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly installed:
   

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



2. Then do the following install (Thanks to Gordon for confirming it is needed).
   

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

   
   
3. Open Sound Juicer.
4. Select Edit/Preferences
5. Click on Edit Profiles
6. Click on New
7. Name it "MP3"
8. Select the new profile, and click on Edit
9. Set the GStreamer Pipeline to:
   

   audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc vbr=4 vbr-quality=2 ! xingmux ! id3v2mux

10. Set the File Extension to mp3
11. Make sure Active? is selected.
12. Click OK
13. Close the Audio Profiles window and the Sound Juicer preferences
14. At this point I couldn't select my newly created profile in Sound Juicer, so I had to...
    
15. Close and restart Sound Juicer.
16. Now select Edit/Preferences again.
17. For Output Format select your newly created MP3 format.
18. Close the Preferences pane.
    

Now if you Extract in Sound Juicer you should end up with MP3 files.

Note: It looks like one should be able to use Rythmbox to rip MP3 directly using its "Copy to library function" but it doesn't work for me. I select Edit/Preferences and then selecting your new MP3 format as the Preferred Format. But then when I try to Copy to library I get the following error:

Error transferring track
no element "xingmux"

Note 2: Apparently these changes will only make MP3 ripping available to the current user. This post has directions for making MP3 ripping available to all users on the system.