Take today for example – I fire up Sound Juicer and begin the process of ripping a CD. When it’s done I plug in my iPod, launch gtkpod and try to import the new tracks. Except I can’t. The tracks have been ripped into .ogg files (that the iPod doesn’t like).

Curious… they were ripping as mp3 before. I open up the preferences dialog and find it’s been… simplified. The menu for output format consists of a drop-down with “CD Quality, Lossless / CD Quality, Lossy / Voice”. No mention of bit-rates or codecs. What’s going on?

For one of the first times ever in a Gnome app, I actually hit the “Help” button:

If you need to store tracks in the MP3 format (for example, because your portable music player only supports MP3 and not Ogg Vorbis), you will need to create a new profile. To do this, run gnome-audio-profiles-properties, press New and name it MP3. Then press Edit and set GStreamer Pipeline to audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc, the File Extension to mp3, and check Active. Then start Sound Juicer and select the MP3 format.

I tried it, the MP3 profile is added to the gconf database for my user (rather than the system), and it becomes available for selection in Sound Juicer (and presubaly any other app coded to use the Audio Profile). The media profile model is quite similar to the approach used in Windows Media Producer where you can define custom encoding profiles.

With previous versions of Sound Juicer the user was presented with a list of radio checkboxes “ogg”,”mp3″,”wav” etc. This had several problems – firstly the ethical pollution of having dirty semi-proprietary codecs hardcoded into your interface, some of which wouldn’t work without the inclusion of libraries that Debian doesn’t distribute itself (due to patent issues). Secondly, the user wasn’t given any ability to tweak those settings (channels, bit-rates). And thirdly the application would need to be updated every time a new codec (such as AAC) was required.

Presumably the plan is for future packages of the gstreamer libs to drop default profiles into the gconf database (they’re just XML files) on installation, meaning that people won’t have to manually add in new profiles.

Despite my initial annoyance and confusion I actually think Audio Profiles are an elegant compromise between the user-friendly configuration of Gnome apps (and Juicer is probably the perfect example of this), and the arcane command based pipeline juju of GStreamer.  I guess there are some useful possibilities (e.g. AAC encoding, creating a profile tweak the gain for European iPods, etc).

It’s a shame I didn’t know about it until after I started ripping. Oh well, as the saying goes “foo is only free if your time is worthless”. But, hey, I’m happy to spend it beta-testing the future.

Gnome2.2 now features a comparatively sophisticated font configuration dialog.