Issue playing wav attachments in Thunderbird

Support and Help
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1

I’m running ubuntu 24.04 with Thunderbird
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If double-click a wave file in a folder in the GUI, or run the xdg-open command, i.e.
jhuber@t5610:~/Desktop$ xdg-open 6822237378_20250127_094036.wav
the wav file opens in totem and plays just fine…all is good.

In Thunderbird, if I right-click on the file, I get the dialog
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Then, I get the dialog
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First, why is totem not available in this list?

Secondly, I selected Audacity, and now Thunderbird doesn’t display the dialog to select the application, it just uses Audacity, which takes a long time to load. The desktop still opens wavs with totem. How do I get Thunderbird to stop using Audacity?

It seems that Thunderbird and the Ubuntu have a different idea of what the default app is for playing wavs. Is this snap related?

Thanks!

2

Audacity is not really an audio player but an audio editor though i accept that it can play .wav and other audio files.
I suggest you install the small player audacious and set thunderbird to use that rather than audacity.

No idea about snaps as I don’t use them but their inability to connect to files in unusual places in the filesystem is well known so could be your problem.

3

This is actually most likely an XDG portal issue, flatpak and snaps use portals to talk to the host in certain cases …

IIRC the config for that particular dialog ends up in .config/mimeapps.list take a look if you have that file and if audacity is set in there …

4

My .config/mimeapps.list has audacity listed in one line:

audio/x-wav=org.kde.kaffeine.desktop;org.kde.kwave.desktop;audacity.desktop;

However, if i check the type of the wav file, it shows
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audio/vnd.wave is not listed in .config/mimeapps.list

5

Also, /usr/share/applications/ contains org.gnome.Totem.desktop.

So, it looks like .config/mimeapps.list needs to be somehow updated to know about totem?

6

If I right-click on a file in the file explorer, and look at the “Open With” tab, I see the dialog below, so I am not sure why this one is different than the one that pops from Thunderbird. “Videos” is just the name for org.gnome.Totem.desktop.

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