Ripping CDs to MP3 Format with Sound Juicer

I’ve got Sound Juicer (listed on the Fedora 9 menu under Applications/Sound & Video/Audio CD Extractor or command line sound-juicer) able to rip CDs as MP3s for my daughters’ Sansa Shaker and M240 MP3 players.  They asked me to put a CD on their players for them.  Actually, they asked me to put a half dozen CDs on their players.  Rather than sign up as the family audio technician, I’d rather teach the elder to do it.  I told her I’d get things ready for her and off she bounded to watch “How to Eat Fried Worms”.

I started Sound Juicer and went to Edit/Preferences on the menu.  Under Output formats, there was only  FLAC, Ogg, and Speex.  I couldn’t remember how I got MP3 ripping enabled and this box is Fedora 8, not 9, so I went to Fedora FAQ 8:

  1. Follow steps in Configuring Yum
  2. Install GStreamer MP3 Drivers (under Rhythmbox)

Then MP3 was available as an output option, so I set that and ripped Hannah Montana (ugh).

Since Sansa players organize music by MP3 tag, I needed to check that these were correctly set.  There are many ID3 tag editors.  I happen to use Kid3.   Thankfully, the tags set by Sound Juicer were fine.  Except they were in version 2 (ID3v2) format and the  Sansa M240 uses version 1 (ID3v1) tags.  (The Shaker doesn’t have a screen, so it’s OK for that one).  This meant that the music was playable but in the M240 menus, it all shows up as “unknown”.  To fix with Kid3, I selected all the tracks with Ctrl-A and clicked “From Tag 2” and Save.