K3b is a good CD burning app for Ubuntu. But it won’t burn MP3 files right out of the box. A bit of Googling and trial and error reveals the fix for this.
(Soapbox) As long as the Ubuntu community thrashes and resists loading, BY DEFAULT, the codecs that everyone uses, Ubuntu will never be adopted as a viable desktop OS by the masses. The ability to handle media right out of the box is integral to making friends with the user. As a tangent to that, I still to this day have not found a good media player for Ubuntu. All of them are broken in one way or another. But that is a topic for another post… (Soapbox end)
Now that I’ve got that off my chest, here’s how to enable MP3 support in K3b.
- Close any running K3b windows. Since this process needs to work on K3b, it needs to not be running.
- Open a terminal. This can be done via Applications, Accessories, Terminal.
- Type “sudo apt-get install libk3b3-extracodecs”, without the quotes, and hit Enter. You should be prompted for your password; go ahead and enter it. You will be confronted with a list of packages your system needs to download. Press “y” for yes, and hit Enter. Aptitude (the program that manages the software on your computer) will download and install the extra pieces of K3b that allow it to open MP3s, as well as other formats that were not included in the K3b core. When this is finished, you can feel free to close the terminal window.
And you’re done! You should now be able to use K3b with MP3 files.
If you encounter any problems, or have ideas for improvement of this tutorial, please leave me a comment.