I have lost the ability to save music in MP3 format [SOLVED....sort of]

Paul Otheim coriolis220 at gmail.com
Fri Nov 5 02:56:18 UTC 2010


I had written asking if anyone had experienced the loss of the ability to
save files in MP3 format. There were several helpful suggestions,
unfortunately none of them panned out. I was going to start checking
permissions as suggested but I could not swallow this as a
solution. It did not seem to make sense that the permissions had changed. I
had not changed them, if an update had been responsible
then others would have run into the problem as well. The other possibility
might have been that someone else had changed them but
no one else here would use my computer without asking and if they did I
would simply have created a separate account for them to use.
Perhaps a remote attacker but I keep my firewall as closed as possible, do
not allow ssh access to this machine and its not on when I am not here
anyway.
 Someone might still have gained access but there is nothing of personal or
professional value here and modifying the culprit file seems an unlikely way
to cover
 ones tracks if someone had accessed the machine. Admittedly I do not
entirely understand  the purpose of this file....I am getting to the sort of
solution referenced
in the subject line. So following that line of reasoning I decided it had to
be related to this user profile.

I went into the ~/.gconf/system folder, since the problem was not
application specific it seemed like a good place to start. Inside this
folder I have
a directory, gstreamer, and another file named %gconf.xml. Assuming the
gstreamer directory was created by the gstreamer packages I had installed
I figured that would not be it as no one else reported the problem. So I
opened the only other file there %gconf.xml, its empty. On a whim I renamed
by adding .old
to the name. Logged out and back in and viola suddenly my apps now have the
option for mp3 again. I ripped a cd in mp3 format. The resulting files
played without
issue. So I went back, renamed the file to its original state, log out and
back in. Bang, no more mp3 options! I added the .old to the file name.
Logout/in , presto mp3
functionality restored.

So my question now is what is the purpose of this empty file? I went into
the ~/.gconf/system/gstreamer directory and in that directory and several
sub-directories there
are files named %gconf.xml, most empty when viewed with a text editor,
perhaps that is not the app to view the contents correctly but it did open
with gedit and if it couldn't
read the contents would expect an error or a file full of undecipherable
characters. The .gconf directories seem to be littered with files like this
most of them empty though
a few have what look mostly like bool values and formatting options to my
amateur eyes.

So I have my solution but I cannot explain this, since empty files with this
same name, %gconf.xml, appear all over the place. Presumably the apps go
into the ~/.gconf/system
 directory looking for these files, apparently they would hit this
particular instance of it and use it for something but who knows what?
Writing values to it for one time use maybe.
 Making the file disappear by renaming it fixes the issue but again I don't
know why this should be so. I am guessing that the apps should have been
looking in the gstreamer directory
 instead, perhaps to figure out supported formats but that does not make
sense since I only lost the ability to save as mp3's and not .wav, ogg,
flac, mp2 or any others.   I do not like to
 guess.

Thanks
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