Serpentine creator is giving me fits.
For a period of about 3 weeks after installing Ubuntu and the gstream codec,s I had no problem ripping mp3 files, saving them as mp3 files (instead of .ogg) and burning the mp3 files to disk. Suddenly this has changed.

Now, after successfully ripping audio files from a CD and saving them as mp3 files, when I attempt to create a copy on a blank disk, the process starts but then stops. At this point, an error message appears stating "Converting Files Failed".
Something, somehow, has decided to suddenly UNwork. I have un- and re-installed Serpentine, gstream and Sound Juicer and everything else I can think of that might be related. What am I missing that I need to adjust, fix or install?

When the government finally outlaws our guns, only the outlaws and governments will have any guns.

Did you notice any updates to ubuntu that might have installed?

Consider a clean install of ubuntu again maybe.

"Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, are in my top 10

" I have un- and re-installed Serpentine, gstream and Sound Juicer and everything else I can think of that might be related. "

In the uninstallation did you also search for and delete the " rpm.save " files,? If not any configuration errors in the rpm.save file will come back,

Not sure how to diagnose your error, ??? I use K3b and ,,,, depending on the media, It for the most part works fine for me,,

Could look up the hardware compatibility list to see what drives and media are supported, ????

Could also be a licensing issue with the MP3 format, ??? Lots of reasons, not enough to go on ,,

Jefro probably has the better Idea,,,,

repositories, other issues ,,, any debug log messages, ???

I know with one kernel update my dvd,cd burner seemed to quit working and the error was a buffer setting, ( memory had to be expanded, ) write speed also had to be decreased to less than the drive was capable,,, In any case,,,,

Good luck Huh !!!

MSI 845e mb 1 gb ram and a p4 2.4n running fedora 7 xp ,win 2000 advanced server and win 98 SE alot to learn and I know so little !!!!

That might work. Try another app?? See if it works.

"Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, are in my top 10

Thank you both for the comments and recommendations.

Man, oh man, I would really like to avoid a complete uninstall/reinstall of ubuntu! What a pain in the neck, now that I've begun moving files and such...

Quacked, to answer your question, no. I didn't mess with the rpm.save that you mentioned. I will do so this evening. I might also need to give k3b a try.

As to this being a hardware compatibility issue, I'm skeptical because, as I stated, I sucessfully used this stuff for about three weeks before the problem began. I'm much more inclined to believe an update could be the cause as there have been a couple of them cross my plate since the install.

The gstreamer I installed was specific to mp3 files and, after installing it I was able to rip audio files in mp3 format. In fact, I can still- even with the current burn problems- rip in mp3 format. That, of course would be a function of Sound Juicer (the ripping part). On the other hand, the burning part of the process is accomplished with Serpentine. It seems that, suddenly, it has lost its ability to cope with the same mp3 files it was previously working with. Bear in mind that the files I have copied to HDD are playable, which indicates, to me at least, that the saved files are not corrupted

Finally, the 2 optical drives I am using in this machine are both new Samsung units (model# SH-S223F). Supposed to be quicker than a cat. Now, I understand that sometimes new things break or don't work as well as they're supposed to. But the likelihood of MY 2 units breaking in the same way, when no one else on Newegg's site has mentioned anything of the like..., well, you get the picture.
Incidentally, while I'm pleased as a hog in slop about the low noise level and non-vibration of these 2 units, neither of them have ever approached the kind of speed they are advertised as being capable of.

When the government finally outlaws our guns, only the outlaws and governments will have any guns.

Two items I failed to mention in the previous post:
I have never received any kind of an error message except the "Converting Files Failed" message mentioned, above.

I have 2GB of RAM installed in the machine and another (excessive) 2GB of swap partitioned, which has never been touched by anything I've done on the machine. Mem86+ indicates all is well regarding RAM.

When the government finally outlaws our guns, only the outlaws and governments will have any guns.

" and everything else I can think of that might be related. "

That would mean " cdrecord " also,,???

Anyway ,, the " memory " I referred to was the " Buffer " of the program doing the burning , In k3b, at the top of program window , ( the toolbar ) there is an menu under ,,, Settings < configure k3b < Advanced

In there there is a memory buffer setting,

Since I haven't used ,,, Serpentine,,, I am unsure, of where that is,,,

Media ,, the CD disc,,, Sometimes , some media are supported while others ( whether low quality or of good quality ) are unsupported by the OS,

I had done some looking around about Ubuntu and burning Audio CD's , and in looking for some other causes, ( long as the Audio CD wasn't "Copy Protected " in some way ) Sounds like it should've worked, ,, Automatically converting the MP3's back into CDA ??? format, for playing in a CD Player

The gstreamer plugins Ugly,,, is supposedly also something that was needed ,,, ( from what I understand, )

Haven't found the location and or methods yet for having the log files and error messages for Serpentine, to ask you to post them,,, Unsure right now ,, ( also unsure if I could interpret them well enough to give you a solution ) So anyway ,,, Just trying to throw out some Ideas to try,,, Good luck Huh !!!

MSI 845e mb 1 gb ram and a p4 2.4n running fedora 7 xp ,win 2000 advanced server and win 98 SE alot to learn and I know so little !!!!

Quacked,

First, let me apologize for the time lapse between your post and now. I appreciate all your efforts and hope you don't think otherwise.

Serpentine is the default pkg in Ubuntu and, as I asy, it worked for a while. I assume there is some kind of bug that is responsible for it suddenly quiting, since Ubuntu is apparently known to do this kind of arbitrary stuff after an update.

At any rate, after messing with Serpentine for a couple of weeks and not finding a fix or anyone who could definitively say what the problem was/is, I dumped the darn thing and have since been quite happy with the way K3b is working.

Meanwhile, I've also been looking at some of the other Linux distros such as Mandriva and Knoppix. I still want to look at Suse and a few others- it's just a matter of finding the time. The only thing I'm certain of at this point is, I will not adulterate my machine with a Windows OS.
For the moment, then, I suppose I'm stuck with Ubuntu/Kubuntu until I find a distro which fits the machine and me more comfortably.

Thank you for the effort and the good wishes!

When the government finally outlaws our guns, only the outlaws and governments will have any guns.

No problem about the time , Lag , Maybe,,,

Glad to hear that a different program worked for you,

I myself have been using Fedora - started with 4,,, gave up for a while and then went back, have been staying with it since 7, and now using 9

I really liked SUSE,,, Adding repositories was super easy, YAST was,,, a little slow , with all the repositories I had enabled,,

Was stable for quite some time,,,,

Centos 5.2, now for a server Distro,( have it set-up on a separate disk, to configure the Web server, Lamp set-up ,,, In a more secure manner than I have right now with the file permission settings , and SE Linux set to Enforcing, ) Sooooo Much to Learn !!!! ( supported for 5 yrs,,??? )

Fedora may have a few bugs here and there itself, but have Grown to Like it,,, There are so many choices with linux Distros, It's Unreal!!!

They all in one way or another resemble each other in their file Hierarchy and some of the commands, syntax,,,

Well I've babbled on long enough about nothing,,, Good Luck with Your Endeavours,Huh!!!!

MSI 845e mb 1 gb ram and a p4 2.4n running fedora 7 xp ,win 2000 advanced server and win 98 SE alot to learn and I know so little !!!!