Rhythmbox is the music player that comes on the default Ubuntu installation. Anyone that has ever used iTunes, Windows Media Player or any other similar program will find it very intuitive. You do need to download an extension to add MP3 capability, but this is easy to do.

What frustrated me for months has been the lack of options for ripping music from CDs. Although it has a great selection of formats (WAV, flac, ogg, mp3) it doesn’t give you any options for setting the mp3 bitrate. At last I found a way, and thought I would pass it on:

Open “Preferences” from the “Edit” menu
Select the “Edit” button to the right of “Preferred Format”
Select “CD Quality, MP3” from the menu and hit “Edit”
Under the “Gstreamer pipeline” field you will find the following:

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

To remove the default, remove the vbr-quality=6 statement, and replace it with vbr=0 bitrate=256. This will change it from variable to constant bit rate, and set it to 256 kb/s. You can set it to whatever bit rate you prefer, I like 256. You line should now look like the following:

audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc mode=0 vbr=0 bitrate=256 ! id3v2mux

Close the window, and Viola! You’ll now rip CDs at a higher quality