I have tried for some time now to rip MP3's in Linux and I am getting nowhere. I am really tired of having to find a Windows XP box to rip music.

I have tried Sound Juicer and GRIP and I am sure I have the GStreamer LAME plugin installed.

In Soundjuicer I created a MP3 profile and followed the instructions to enable MP3 and also in GRIP but all I get is an MP3 file that has static audio and the bit rate level jumps all over the place. I never hear music at all.

Anyone know of a utility that just works with out having some complex setup to simply rip as MP3? I don't know what I am doing wrong but I have managed to do so on 3 different boxes.

Easiest thing is to install lame.

Add ... deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org testing main ... to your sources.list, and:

# aptitude (or apt-get)
# aptitude (or apt-get) install lame lame-extras liblame0

I use grip to rip cd's to mp3, and it doesn't give me any problems. Most of the time I rip to ogg from the command line though.
If you rip cd's - using lame from the command line is probably not the nicest way to do it, but you could try it to see if lame is the problem.

I think you have a prob with lame or grip. Grip has always worked well for me from Fedora to BSD.