Today I went to copy my music library from Banshee to an old iPod mini. I found out the hard way that the Ubuntu 11.04 upgrade tool uninstalls the necessary programs for MP3 encoding support, causing Banshee to fill my iPod with WAV files.

This is most likely a [philosophical decision](http://www.ubuntu.com/project/about-ubuntu/our-philosophy “Our philosophy | Ubuntu”) stemming from the ongoing debate between [open-source pragmatists and free software idealists](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_movement#Criticism_and_controversy “Free software movement – Wikipedia”). We won’t get into that here, but assuming you *do* want MP3 support, it’s a simple fix:

# apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

Once this package is istalled, restart Banshee and it should automatically encode to MP3 without changing any settings.

Don’t get me wrong–I admire the idealists, but I also want to fit more than 20 songs on my iPod.