Why Your New Kubuntu Install Won’t Play Music

Posted on June 13, 2006

Boy, did this one drive me nuts!

As mentioned earlier, I’ve been working out the kinks in the KDE version of Ubuntu Linux (“Kubuntu”) on my home PC. One thing that I couldn’t figure out was why none of the multimedia apps bundled with Kubuntu (Kaffeine, AmaroK, etc.) could play back music — but when I downloaded non-standard apps like VLC, they played music just fine.

I finally found the answer this evening. Apparently there’s a known issue with Kubuntu where an important codec package does not get installed, which results in the no-sound-with-bundled apps problem because all the bundled apps rely on the same library (Xine) for audio processing.

It’s easy to fix, once you know what the problem is — just install the libxine-extracodecs package, either by using Adept or by going to the console and typing the following:

sudo apt-get install libxine-extracodecs

Now if I could just figure out why my printer won’t print…