There is a nasty bug in Sound Juicer, the Audio CD ripping application that ships with Fedora 13 (and every other Gnome distribution on the planet, I expect). First you insert a CD -and if you like listening to classical music, it is quite likely you will see a yellow panel declaring that ‘Could not find Unknown Title by Unknown Artist on MusicBrainz’. Fair enough: I usually end up supplying my own titles, artists and track names anyway, because other people submitting to these CD databases often have a peculiar idea of how to do it properly. But anyway: you finish ripping that CD; you insert another, and this time you get this:

CD Ripping bug in Soundjuicer

Since Google is my friend, I’m fairly confident I am a victim of bug 544843, which was described back in April 2010.

I have to admit, of course, that I’ve not paid a cent for Sound Juicer and I’m not on a support contract for it either… but I still can’t help feeling disappointed that an application whose sole purpose in life is to rip an audio CD can’t do it, apparently because of some weird interaction with a music track lookup service (which is very much its secondary role in life).

You’ll note from that bug report that, apart from being able to describe what happens accurately enough, no-one has seen fit to explain what exactly is causing the problem, what the workarounds are and when a fix is to be expected.

So basically, the hot news is: Gnome desktops can’t currently rip CDs with the tool provided for the job.

I don’t really have a practical workaround, other than not using Sound Juicer. Instead, I installed asunder (a simple yum install asunder works for Fedora 13). That seems a bit archaic, but does the job. Actually, it’s not necessary for it even to do its job: if you run it, get it to find the track listing for the same CD that caused the problem for Sound Juicer, then shut it down without having ripped anything, and then launch Sound Juicer again -well, this time Sound Juicer will display the correct number of tracks and let you rip them. It will still moan about not knowing what those tracks are, because MusicBrainz is, apparently, so useless. But at least the ripping functionality will be there… until the next CD.

So the routine becomes: insert CD. Run Asunder. Close Asunder. Run Sound Juicer. Manually edit tracks and artist details. Rip. Repeat as necessary.

Which is, of course, utterly bonkers and the reason why I’m now planning on ditching Fedora. Or, at least, since it’s not particularly Fedora at fault, of course, but Gnome’s, I might just be tempted to plunge headlong into the choppy waters that is KDE -simply because Sound Juicer is Gnome’s default audio ripping application, and so KDE should be free of its curse.

I’ll keep you posted, anyway…