Kubuntu 8.10 and K3b

I went to rip a CD of mine and discovered that K3b kept erroring out every time I tried to get it to rip the CD to MP3. K3b seemed content with OGG, but not so much with MP3. So after some poking around, I found that a bug was already written up on it. The bug however led me to a workaround/fix. Apparently what resolves the problem is to edit the lame settings in K3b to enable both Swap Byte Order and Write Wave Header. Once these are done, then K3b rips the CD in MP3 without any further issue. Is this really a fix? No, it's a workaround.

As an additional note, you may also need to modify the string that is passed to the lame encoder. The string that I use is as follows:

lame -h --add-id3v2 --pad-id3v2 --abr 192 --tt %t --ta %a --tl %m --ty %y --tn %n --tc %c - %f

Basically what this does, is make sure that version two of the ID3 is filled in and that the average bitrate is set to 192. Aside from that, it also makes sure that all of the fields are actually filled in.

Now if I could only figure out why SoundKonverter fails to convert files to MP3, I just might get a bit closer to nirvanna.