yesterday, i noticed i could no longer play wma files with audacious in ubuntu. and i was fairly certain that i was able to before. did some googling and it appears that ubuntu 11.10 ships with a much older version of audacious (still in the 2.x series). the webup8 PPA carries a newer 3.x version of audacious where the wma playing functionality is restored.

to add the PPA run:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8