Newb: Easiest way to import w/specified sample rate?

[mwic]

I'm brand new to audacity and loving it, but have trouble getting a sizable part of my collection imported correctly.
For a bunch of my mp3s, I just "audacity file.mp3" and it imports and sounds great and I start having fun.
For others (e.g.: http://www.archive.org/download/csr016/ ... licias.mp3 ) it imports, but makes a horrible squeaky noisy mess when I hit play, which (total guess) is a sample rate issue?

So I tried ye olde "Project Rate" in the corner, setting to 16000 instead of 44100 default.

Bam! Worked perfectly!

-How do I detect the sample rate of the existing file before import (in audacity or via cli)? I'm thinking something like
audacity --rate 16000 martiniBomb.mp3
or
ffmpeg --what's-the-sample-rate-of martiniBomb.mp3

[steve]

You're using Audacity 1.2.x on Linux?

I'm using Audacity 1.3.9 on Ubuntu Jaunty and that file imports correctly, no problem.

[mwic]

Yes it's 1.3.7 on Fedora 11

[steve]

OK, you've posted in the wrong part of the forum - I'll move it to the 1.3.x section.

I've tried that file in several different versions of Audacity, and it works fine - I can't reproduce the problem. Perhaps it is a problem specific to the Fedora build.
Do you know how to build programs from the source code?
It may be worth checking on Fedora forums to see if anyone else is having the problem - the common issue that we see here is when someone has a WMA file, or some other format, that has been named as an MP3 - but that's not the case here - that MP3 looks fine to me.