Can't encode in mp3 asunder

Question

When I try to rip CD's from Asunder and automatically encode in mp3, I get the following error:

'lame' was not found in your path.  Asunder requires it to create MP3 files. All MP3 functionality is disabled.

What's going on, and how can I fix it? I tried installing ubuntu-restricted-extras as suggested on some forums, but it didn't help.

Solution

It turned out the problem was very simple, so simple I missed it. I'm including the answer here in hopes that it will help someone.

It turns out the program lame, which is used for encoding mp3's by asunder, wasn't installed. All I had to do was:

sudo apt install lame

...and that was it!

Note that the recommended method for encoding mp3 is to rip in wav and reconvert to mp3 by an application that uses a different back-end plugin such as Sound Juicer, since lame does not produce high quality mp3's.

Comments

[andrew.46]

lame has the ability to output 320k (CBR) mp3s as its maximum bitrate plus more rational settings for VBR encoding. It should just be a matter of altering the encoding settings within Asunder to get great quality mp3s?