CD ripping (sound-juicer) stuffed in karmic

My favourite CD ripper 'grip' has disappeared from the repository in ubuntu as of karmic. The built-in is sound-juicer, which sucks.

It comes with a shitty MP3 profile, but wouldn't even let me select it in the profile menu (yes, it was 'active'). Finally I ended up deleting all the profiles and creating my open mp3 profile, which allowed me to select it, but after I clicked extract, it always failed with 'failed to get output format'. I have the bad and ugly gstreamer packages installed, as well as lame.

I gave up and fell back to abcde, which is a command-line utility.

I edited '/etc/abcde.conf' and set:

LAMEOPTS="--preset standard"

then used 'abcde -o mp3'.

Why is it always so damn hard to rip a CD to mp3 in linux?