how to install mp3 encoder on linux mint
 

Despite following instructions on how to play mp3s on linux Mint, I still can't quite get it to work. I just converted to linux about 3 weeks ago and I am still learning the OS. I managed to download "fluendo-mp3-4.i386" which claims to fix this problem. with this package, comes instructions as to how to install this plugin.

this is what it says:
........................................................................
Once you are root you can copy all the files contained in the
codecs directory in the following directory
/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/

If that directory does not exist that can mean that GStreamer 0.10 is not
installed or is installed in a different location. If it is installed in a
different location you can figure out where that is with the following command :

root@host# gst-inspect-0.10 oggdemux | grep Filename

which should return something like :

Filename: /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstogg.so

Meaning that plugins are installed in /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/

To copy all the codecs in the GStreamer plugins directory run the following
command (assuming your current working directory is inside the unpacked codec
archive where this documentation is):

root@host# cp ./codecs/* /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/
........................................................................

I copied the file into the gstreamer-0.10 directory, but when I type "gst-inspect-0.10" in the terminal, nothing would occur. I am pretty sure I am not doing this correctly so any help would be appreciated.

I guess mint has its own package management software that can be used to install the packages that you need.
You can get mplayer through it that can play a lot of music file types.

mp3's play well with Movie Player
 

A simple right click on the mp3 file and select open with movie player works perfectly on Linux Mint 5.1

Take a look in /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10 for filename libgstmad.so this is the name of the mp3 decoder codec.

movie player
 

movie player worked for playing music. however in movie player, it doesn't allow you to filter the playlist to play only certain songs. this is an issue when you have a couple of thousand songs and they are not organized at all.

Hi there,

I'd still recommend using MPLayer. It's pretty fast and powerful too! I just think you can't go wrong with that. Installing from source is also straightforward. I'm not sure if Mint has it on their repositories (they should though).

In terms of managing a playlist, MPlayer takes a list of playlist parsed from text with -playlist parameter. So dump the path to all your desired songs in there.

That's just the way I would go about it, but of course the choice is yours ^^. Good luck!