Mine the Harvest

Recently I was getting errors when trying to rip mp3 files on my Suse 11.3 box, though it seems this issue affects various distributions using KDE. The solution in my case turned out to be quite simple.

Original error when using K3B or audiocd://

Could not read some_song.mp3: encoding failed
WARNING: libsndfile may ignore -r and perform fseek's on the input.
Compile without libsndfile if this is a problem.

I downloaded and compiled the latest version of lame from Sourceforge – which is the same version as the one I had from Packman – 3.98.4. The version I compiled, specifying no additional options, allows ripping of mp3 files no problem.

Running ldd on the packman (Suse repo) binary, and the one I compiled, show that the pm one is indeed compiled with libsndfile:
Callandor:~ # ldd /usr/bin/lame*
/usr/bin/lame:
linux-vdso.so.1 => (0x00007fff563ff000)
libncurses.so.5 => /lib64/libncurses.so.5 (0x00007fc9202d2000)
libm.so.6 => /lib64/libm.so.6 (0x00007fc92007b000)
libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x00007fc91fd1b000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2 (0x00007fc91fb17000)
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007fc920527000)
.
/usr/bin/lame-pm:
linux-vdso.so.1 => (0x00007fff9cfff000)
libmp3lame.so.0 => /usr/lib64/libmp3lame.so.0 (0x00007f84c6fc3000)
libncurses.so.5 => /lib64/libncurses.so.5 (0x00007f84c6d6e000)
libsndfile.so.1 => /usr/lib64/libsndfile.so.1 (0x00007f84c6b07000)
libm.so.6 => /lib64/libm.so.6 (0x00007f84c68b0000)
libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x00007f84c6550000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2 (0x00007f84c634c000)
libFLAC.so.8 => /usr/lib64/libFLAC.so.8 (0x00007f84c60fc000)
libvorbisenc.so.2 => /usr/lib64/libvorbisenc.so.2 (0x00007f84c5d21000)
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f84c723f000)
libogg.so.0 => /usr/lib64/libogg.so.0 (0x00007f84c5b1a000)
libvorbis.so.0 => /usr/lib64/libvorbis.so.0 (0x00007f84c58ed000)

Input from other users on the Suse foum shows that this issue is a bit hit and miss. For some, lame linked against libsndfile seems to work okay. For myself and others on various bug reports, not so much. Building lame is very easy though, and should you be experiencing this issue it might be something to try.