While I was waiting an hour for kdelibs to compile again, I googled around regarding JuK's mp3 support in ubuntu.

Apparently it's the supporting library, libtunepimp, that has no mp3 support in ubuntu.

I'd already downloaded the latest source, and compiled it manually, assumedly with mp3 support, so I wasn't sure why that didn't fix it.

I'd seen references to simply replacing libtunepimp fixing the issue for other people.

I tried installed amarok, since it supposedly has mp3 support, but that didn't work either, it would just immediately come up and tell me that it couldn't find the song.

I found this page, referencing "trm", the support binary that is used to query the songs.

I checked, and found I had 2 copies of this. One in /usr/local/bin, with mp3 support, the one I compiled, and in /usr/bin, without mp3 support, that must have come from the deb, and that JuK was calling.

I removed the /usr/bin one, and JuK still did not work. I symlinked the one with mp3 support in there, but it didn't work still.

I figured maybe the deb of libtunepimp was causing issues elsewhere, so I tried removing it, but because JuK is dependent on it, it was going to remove JuK too. Damn.

I eventually found this thread, where "metwo" has recompiled libtunepimp with mp3 support, and packaged it as a deb, to replace the dumb non mp3 ones.

You can download the files from the thread, or from here and here. I used dpkg to install them, and immediately JuK had mp3 support for lookups.

What a bloody saga.