Ubuntu – How to edit CD Rip settings in Rhythmbox to improve mp3 quality

It happens that I was able to fix somehow this problem.

I ran gstreamer-properties and noticed that the default output plugin was set on "autodetect". I looked at the available plugins and closed the gstreamer-properties windows while "autodetect" was still chosen as the default output plugin. When I ran Banshee, the sound was then identical to the one produced by either Rhythmbox or Totem.

In order to try to reproduce and understand the previous problem, I successively chose, as default output plugins, ALSA, ESD and PulseAudio Sound Server. In all cases, the sound between the three applications was strictly identical.

Calling gstreamer-properties seems to have fix this problem.

Just so we're talking on the same page, the pipeline used by this encoding target looks like the following on my system:

audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lamemp3enc name=enc target=0 quality=6 ! xingmux ! id3v2mux

You can learn about each of the elements in the pipeline with the gst-inspect-0.10 tool. For example, to learn about the MP3 encoder used here, you could run:

gst-inspect-0.10 lamemp3enc

Among other things, this will tell you about the various properties supported by the element and their defaults. This tells me:

• encode using variable bit rate (cbr=false from defaults)
• the encoder has been set to optimise for quality rather than a target bitrate (target=0)
• uses a VBR quality setting of 6 (quality=6)
• uses the standard quality of the LAME engine (encoding-engine-quality=standard from defaults)

So you should already be getting VBR output from that pipeline. If you want higher quality, lower the 'quality=' number (0-10, 0 is the highest quality) and perhaps add encoding-engine-quality=high.