Preferences

The preferences window allows you to control:

  • Which CD drive Sound Juicer uses, if you have more than one drive,
  • Whether or not to eject the CD when Sound Juicer is finished extracting,
  • Whether or not to open the music folder when Sound Juicer is finished extracting,
  • Where the extracted audio files are placed on your computer,
  • Which system to use for the folder hierarchy in the music folder,
  • Which format to use for the track names of the extracted audio files, and
  • Which file format and codec are used for the extracted audio files.

5.1. Selecting a CD Drive

If you have multiple CD drives in your computer, the drop-down list labelled CD drive under Device allows you to select which drive to use. The check boxes Eject when finished and Open music folder when finished allow you to control whether Sound Juicer will eject the CD from the drive, and whether it will open your music folder respectively, when it has finished extracting the audio files.

5.2. Naming Audio Files

The Music Folder drop-down list allows you to select which folder to store your audio files in. Select one of the folders from the list, or choose Other to select another folder with the file chooser. By default, files are placed under the Music folder in your home folder.

The Track Names section allows you to control how the files and folders are named. Sound Juicer can store audio files in seperate folders, helping you keep your music organized. You can choose how these folders are created and named using the Folder hierarchy drop-down list. By default, Sound Juicer creates a folder for the album artist and a subfolder for the album.

Use the File name drop-down list to select how the audio files are named. By default, Sound Juicer uses the track number followed by a hyphen and the track title.

Select the Strip special characters check box to make Sound Juicer remove or replace characters such as spaces and punctuation in the filenames. This is useful if you plan to put the audio files onto a portable device or another computer which has more limitations on file names.

Even when Strip special characters is not selected, Sound Juicer will remove the / character from filenames. This character cannot be used in any filenames on UNIX, Linux, and similar systems.

At the bottom of the Track Names section, an example path is shown. This lets you know what a file name might look like and where it is placed, according to your settings for Folder hierarchy, File name, and Strip special characters.

5.3. Selecting a Format

You can select which audio file format Sound Juicer uses to store your tracks on your computer. There are a number of available formats, each with its own advantages. The available formats on your computer may vary, but the following choices are usually available:

CD Quality, Lossy (Ogg multimedia)

This option is selected by default. Ogg Vorbis, like other lossy audio formats (such as MP3 and AAC) discards some information from the original audio data. Although the audio file is not a perfect replica of the CD audio, the differences are often not distinguishable to most listeners. As a result, lossy formats tend to have very small file sizes.

The Ogg Vorbis format is the default lossy format used in Sound Juicer. Ogg Vorbis is an open format, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, which tends to produce smaller file sizes and higher quality audio than many other lossy formats. While it is not as widespread as the older MP3 format, most music software can play Ogg Vorbis files, and many hardware players have incorporated support.

Xiph.Org maintains lists of software players, portable hardware players, and static hardware players which support Ogg Vorbis.

CD Quality, Lossless (FLAC audio)

The FLAC audio format is a lossless format. No audio data is lost when converting to FLAC, even though it compresses audio files by as much as 70%. FLAC and other lossless formats are popular in cases where high fidelity audio is needed, but files need to be compressed to save disk space and network transfer times.

CD Quality, AAC (MPEG-4 audio)

The AAC (short for Advanced Audio Coding) audio format is a standardized lossy format. It is a successor to the MP3 format and it achieves better sound quality than the MP3 format. Many software players and hardware players support the AAC format.

Voice, Lossless (WAV audio)

The Voice output profile produces low-quality mono audio files. You may wish to select this for lectures, books on tape, and other spoken word CDs, where the loss in audio quality is less important.

MP3

The MP3 audio format is a lossy format. It is widely supported and popular, especially because of its use for portable media players.

You can click the Edit Profiles button to edit the available audio formats. The profile editor dialog provides direct access to the audio conversion. Profiles are defined with GStreamer pipelines. GStreamer is the underlying multimedia library used by Sound Juicer and other multimedia applications. A full explanation of audio profiles is outside the scope of this document.