Dan Winship wrote:
But am I wrong in believing that MP3 is the de facto standard compressed audio format? And that many people have devices that play MP3s but not oggs? And that when people say "rip", it's generally assumed they mean "rip to mp3" unless they explicitly name another file format?
Some years ago I used to use grip, which has two buttons, one for "rip" and another for "rip + encode". Yes, at the very first use I was confused a bit that "rip" produced a .wav file, but I understood the process.
If so, then Rhythmbox (or actually, Sound Juicer, right?) has bad confusing UI, because it doesn't support MP3, but it never acknowledges this fact anywhere, leaving the user to assume that it does. (Even I get confused, and I *know* Fedora can't ship MP3 support.)
But Sound Juicer does support MP3. Not out-of-the-box, but after the first step I do after any install.
If our use cases for the "Default CD ripper" feature assume that some people are going to want to rip to MP3 (which I assume they will), and our CD ripping tool is not going to support MP3 (which I assume it won't), then the UI ought to be a lot more explicit about this, and make sure that the user isn't going to waste their time ripping CDs into a format they can't use.
It would be interesting to gather some hard data about how many people rip to mp3, ogg, flac and wav, but I suspect we don't have a clean way to get this data.