How to play MP3 with Ubuntu

It's usual to find many distributions without MP3 support due to licensing issues. If you have MP3 files and don't know how to play them do the following:

  1. Open the terminal
  2. Type sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
  3. Remove comments to packages (This is erasing the # characters in lines starting with ##deb)
  4. Save changes and close gedit
  5. Update the packages sudo apt-get update
  6. Install the mulitmedia codecs:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.8-plugins gstreamer0.8-lame gstreamer0.8-ffmpeg w32codecs libdivx4linux lame sox ffmpeg mjpegtools vorbis-tools gst-register-0.8

Now you can open a player like Rythmbox or Kaffeine and start listening songs. Totem won't play mp3 with this. To associate mp3 files with a player, right-clic on a mp3 file and go to "Open with" tab.