Getting Rythmbox to Recognize MP3s

After I copied over my Itunes library to my Ubuntu 6.10 system I was somewhat surprised to find it didn't recognize MP3s. Poking around the net a little turned up this was do to intelletual property issues and there were a number of different fixes posted (for example).

I tried various ones and here's what I think ended up working for me. I say I think because I tried a number and it started working after what I did below. It's possible some of the prior steps I took were important.

First you have to allow your system to download software from universe and mutliverse. Select System/Administration/Software Sources. Make sure "Community maintained Open Source software (universe)" and "Software restricted by copyright or legal issues (multiverse)" are checked. Then click Close.

Then I ran the following command:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly

And restarted Rythmbox. After that it recognized MP3 just fine.

Note that it still doesn't seem to be able to rip CDs into MP3s. That's still on the todo list...

For the record, here are some of the other things I found on the net that I tried (after adding universe and multiverse to my software sources), which either didn't work or didn't seem to have any effect:

apt-get install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-gl gstreamer0.10-plugins-base gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse libxine-extracodecs w32codecs

apt-get install gstreamer0.8-mad

apt-get install gstreamer0.8-plugins

apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins