What do I need to get playback working on Linux?

this didn't help, my songs still don't play, mp3 and AAC

Are you sure you have set up all those gstreamer plugins? Good, bad AND ugly?

Let's start from the beginning now, shall we. What kind of Linux distribution do you actually use?
One uses this and one uses that kind of thing to play sounds. Ubuntu for the most part runs on ALSA and PulseAudio. Other distros will run on different cores. There could be something wrong with that in your installation. I need facts to work with here ;-)

Lets begin. You could answer these questions and we'll see, what we can do.

1.) What do you run? (Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Suse, Debian, etc., etc.)
2.) Are you sure you followed stevels advice?
3.) Do you hear any sound at all (like from other mediaplayers and such)?
4.) If you don't hear anything, your sound deamon dosn't work and you will have to figure that out, before you would be able to use a mediaplayer...

I'm running opensuse 11 and i installed the good the bad and the ugly and I know my sound drivers are functioning because i can hear audio when i watch stuff on youtube. and I have gstreamer configured to pulse audio. I'm pretty sure there's something really obvious starring at me in the face but I'm a little stupid at the moment so if any one could help that would be really apreciated. Oh and fyi the setting up gstreamer link is broken

I don't have time just now, but searched the wiki of songbird for a possible solution for you. Here's an extensive list about things you might try to fix your problems.
Would be nice, if you could work through those and tell us, if you managed to do it.
If not, I'll catch up with you here after that, when I have time again.

So go look here please first.

gstreamer doesn't work i had the same problem with amarok. you have to configure amarok to use the xine engine, gstreamer wont play mp3 files no matter what you try to do and no matter you have all plugins good bag ugly installed it simply doesn't work. can songbird use other engines? songbird now just doesn't work on any linux distribution, i've tried debian, ubuntu and opensuse. i've managed to make it work only on mac...

BTW the link http://publicsvn.songbirdnest.com/tra... is broken

oh i found out that the reason it wasn't working was because the partition that i have all of my music on wasn't mounted but after i mounted it it play all of my mp3 files fine but it wouldn't play my acc files. maybe it just doesn't like you.

i am running Ubuntu 8.04, after installing all of the gstreamer plugins, it still didn't work, so i went to the sound preferences (ubuntu 8.04: System --> Preferences --> Sound) and changed all of the audio playback options to "ALSA".

Yeah ALSA does the trick. Thank you.
I tried with ACC, MP3 and Windows format.
Cheers,

I dont think this is right to do at all, but what I did to make it work was:
1.) Make sure songbird wasn't running
2.) Made sure I installed gst-plugins-* that were required for playback
3.) I symbolically linked the plugins *.so files to SONGBIRD_DIR/lib/

After that, I started up Songbird and, Voila!, it worked :)