2010
05.26

Rhythmbox and Transcoding

Category: Technology / Tags: no tag / Add Comment

If you’re wondering why Rhythmbox is transcoding your (FLAC) files to 128kbit CBR MP3 files for your DAP, it’s because the ‘lame’ GStreamer encoder plugin is semibroken and deprecated. Can we blame this on the Rhythmbox developers… No… Rhythmbox uses the “CD Quality, MP3″ GNOME Audio Profile for it’s transcoding settings, and GNOME ships this profile semibroken by default. It is however relatively easy to correct, start gnome-audio-profiles-properties, and change the “CD Quality, MP3″ profile’s GStreamer pipeline from:

  audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc mode=0 vbr-quality=6 ! id3v2mux

to:

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

It’s highly debatable that a quality of 6 offers CD quality transparancy, hydrogenaudio has a lot of information on how to select a quality rating of your liking.

I’ve already reported this upstream, including a patch, which is being considered for a GNOME patch release.

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