Get ugly

As I've written in Ubuntu and Multimedia, the bare bones Ubuntu installation does not include proprietary but popular codecs. That means you can't play MP3s.

To get around this, you need to install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse, which fortunately is in the multiverse repository.

To install the plugins, run the following command:

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

It's a short download, only around 40kB worth of files.

From the Gstreamer web site:

GStreamer Ugly Plug-ins is a set of plug-ins that have good quality and correct functionality, but distributing them might pose problems. The license on either the plug-ins or the supporting libraries might not be how we'd like. The code might be widely known to present patent problems.