Rip Audio CDs in Ubuntu

I had an old music audio CD that I wanted to convert/rip to MP3 and then upload to my RockBox-ed Sansa e260. This is quite a simple task if you have the right set of tools with you. Here's how I did it on Ubuntu 9.04.

Here are the steps to get this done:

1. Install SoundJuicer
2. Install MP3 Encoder
3. Setup Sound Juicer to convert to MP3
4. Convert the Audio CD

Install SoundConverter
You need to install soundjuicer application from the Synaptic package manager. This program does the work of converting between formats and supports WAV, FLAC and OGG Vorbis natively. So for converting to MP3 and other formats, it requires the appropriate encoders.

Install MP3 Encoder
You need to install GStreamer MP3 Encoder (gstreamer-0.10-plugins-ugly) from Multi-Verse link apt:gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse?section=multiverse as mentioned on the SoundConverter website since it is not directly supported by Ubuntu and so may not available from the Synaptic package manager.

Setup SoundJuicer to convert to MP3
Now that our installation is complete, fire-up the Sound Juicer application Applications > Sound & Video > Audio CD Extractor and go to Edit > Preferences menu. Change the Format > Output Format to ".MP3"; Bitrate Mode to "Variable (VBR) - Best Quality; and Quality to High.

Convert the required files
This completes our setup and now we are ready to convert files. Just load the audio CD you want to convert and press the Extract button!

Note: Sometimes if the tracks in the Audio CD do not have any tag info, then Sound Juicer simply crashes. In that case, copy the files from the CD onto a local folder and then follow the steps to convert WAV to MP3 in my post here