Audioread for MP3s on Linux

I fail to read mp3 files with Matlab's audioread.

>> audioread('file.mp3')
Error using audioread (line 88)
The file type is not supported

I am on Ubuntu 16.04 and have Matlab R2016a installed. I already have done the workaround for this bug . (Link against my system's more recent libstdc++.) See:

$ readlink -f /usr/local/MATLAB/R2016a/sys/os/glnxa64/libstdc++.so.6
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6.0.21

I have the suspicion, that it could be an gstreamer-issue... As far as I understand, Matlab uses gstreamer 0.1 and I suppose to have gstreamer0.1-fluendo-mp3 installed. However, this is not available for Ubuntu 16.04, only gstreamer 1.0 is available:

$ apt-cache search gstreamer fluendo-mp3 
gstreamer1.0-fluendo-mp3 - Fluendo mp3 decoder GStreamer 1.0 plugin

Any ideas how I could be able to decode mp3 files with audioread? Can I tell Matlab to use gstreamer 1.0 instead of 0.1? Any help is much appreciated.

(I already asked this question on Stackoverflow, with no success so far.)

[Frank Zalkow]

In the case anyone else is interested in this: I contacted the Mathworks support. This functionality is currently not available under Ubuntu 16.04 and there is no workaround. It is intended to be fixed in a future Matlab release.

Answer 1

[Frank-Michael]

Doesnt sound like a particular good solution. They (mathworks) remove wavread which was working quite well and replace it by other code which is not working on all systems due to old linked libraries ... For those who have not yet the most recent Matlab with fixed linkings: you can use audacity (open source) as a workaround - which allows to export /modify various audio formats and can also make a CSV export which finally can go into Matlab

[Walter Roberson]

Not really relevant, as wavread() was only for .wav files, but the poster was hoping to read .mp3 files