Import CD Audio into Ardour?

I was wondering if there’s a way to import audio directly from a CD into Ardour? It’s clumsy to use one program to rip the audio, then import it into Ardour where you do the work. It’s already clumsy to do work in Ardour, export to wav, then use another application to convert it to the actual usable format, be it mp2, mp3, ogg, what have you…
Anyway, any way to do this or am I stuck using Sound Juicer or something like that?

Thanks.

m0d t0dd?

No, we don’t generally do things that way. The philosophy is that there are excellent and free tools available to do the job of ripping CD’s and converting linear PCM audio (WAV, AIFF, etc) into compressed formats. This is not like Windows or OS X, where you would need to pay more to get such tools - Linux has these available (and possibly already installed, depending on your distribution). Why would we want Ardour (and its developers) to replicate all the good work that has been done in SoundJuicer, k3b and other related tools, when these tools are freely available for you to use?

Yes, its mildly irritating when all you want to do is follow a very trivial workflow, and its conceivable that in the future we may add some capabilities to do the most trivial operations from within Ardour. The moment your task becomes more complex, you will probably come to appreciate having a flexible toolbox rather than a sledgehammer.

Note also that encumbering Ardour with mp3 handling will burden the program with licensing issues that we’d rather avoid. Work is proceeding as part of Sakari Bergen’s Finnish Summer of Code project to add capabilities to use external converters as part of Ardour’s own export process.