Ubuntu – How to install mp3pro support

codecsrhythmbox

I've been listening to some of my older music today and I've just come across an album that I ripped back in my 'mp3pro days'… Needless to say it doesn't sound very good, which I'm guessing is because Rhythmbox falling back to normal mp3 (at only 96kbps) instead of playing the mp3pro 'extras' so it sounds tolerable 🙂

Are there codecs that I can use to get mp3pro sounding less horrible or an alternative music player that supports the format? Alternatively, does Rhythmbox already support the format and I'd just not realised how bad it sounds before?

Obviously I'll re-rip it if it comes to that, but it's a hassle I'd rather avoid. (especially since I have quite a few of them)

Thanks!

Best Answer

There are several (possible) solutions for your problem documented here.

It boils down to using Windows software (possibly under Wine) or using the closed source plugin for XMMS. XMMS 1.x itself isn't part of Ubuntu anymore, but maybe you can use it via MPlayer.

You can then convert the music to another format using one of those tools.

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Ubuntu – Rhythmbox isn’t seeing all of the music files

I had a similar problem with Rhythmbox. I don't have nearly the number of files you have, but it was not seeing new files or changed files. I did the following:

In Preferences --> Music, I unchecked "Watch my Library for new files".
Completely closed Rhythmbox (important).
Renamed the rhythmbox database - ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml
Started up Rhythmbox and checked "Watch my Library for new files".
It started checking my collection and found everything.

It seems that my problem was an issue with the configuration file. I had reinstalled Rhythmbox, but had not done a complete uninstall. This left a corrupted configuration file in my Rhythmbox sub-directory. You may want to try this if it's possible that you have a corrupted configuration file.

Ubuntu – How to use Rhythmbox to rip high-quality VBR MP3s

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.

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – Rhythmbox isn’t seeing all of the music files

Ubuntu – How to use Rhythmbox to rip high-quality VBR MP3s

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