Playing MP3s

[Temlakos]

Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:
> 
>    So, why is it that I can not play an MP3 through any of the KDE audio 
> players that come installed 9with you install the KDE stuff) and yet 
> when I manually compiled and installed XMMS, I can play them just fine?
> 
>    Noatrun simply crashes when I try to play an mp3.  Other programs 
> won't do anything when I try to load a file up for playing.  But XMMS 
> works fine, which tells me it's not the hardware.  Something else is 
> causing the other players not to work.  But what?
> 

The issue with MP3 files is not technical at all, but legal.

MP3 is a patented algorithm, and therefore, closed-source.

Fedora /will not/ distribute anything that plays closed-source stuff. In 
some jurisdictions where Fedora is accessible, that would be illegal.

So what many of us end up doing is either (a) installing a third-party 
module to enable XMMS to play MP3 files anyway, or (b) do what you did: 
build XMMS yourself, with the MP3 capabilities preserved.

Now anyone else here will likely tell you to search the archives of the 
Fedora Users' list for the full context of the discussion of MP3 files. 
And I will say that perhaps the MP3 issue has been "talked to death."

But before I send you to the archives, I'd like to say a few words about 
something that's simply missing from the MP3 debate, and that is: /where 
do MP3 files come from/.

Some contributors to this list impress me as having the opinion that 
most, if not all, MP3 content comes from individual users who convert, 
or "rip," Audio CD content into this closed-source format, "just because 
all the players out there play MP3." I wouldn't know about the reality 
of that situation. I have never played /any/ music on any device other 
than my computer or an Audio CD or DVD player. (Am I the last remaining 
non-adopter of iPod or iTunes? Maybe. I don't really care.) My musical 
tastes are somewhat more limited than those of most people here, so that 
I am more likely to tune in a radio station that plays "my kind" of 
music than to try to record single tracks from CD albums to another 
medium. So this "format war" doesn't really affect me.

My advice to anyone who /does/ have Audio CD content that they would 
like to play "on the road" is to /abandon/ MP3 as a format and instead 
look for devices that use the /OGG Vorbis/ format. Now /that/ format is 
another "lossy compression format," and a lot of software I have seen 
that will read MP3 will also read OGG Vorbis. The difference is that OGG 
Vorbis is open-source, while MP3 is closed. OGG Vorbis is just as good 
as is MP3 for the purpose of copying Audio CD content to a more 
"portable" format. So if /you/ have the original, uncompressed (or 
compressed by lossless compression only) sound content and want to know 
where to rip it to, rip to OGG Vorbis. You'll save yourself a lot of 
headaches.

The problem is that a lot of /original multimedia content/ is in the MP3 
format. Users who want access to /this/ kind of file have a problem: 
they often can't access the content in any other format. MP3 is all they 
have access to. And if they /could/ convert MP3 back to WAV (which is 
the uncompressed format) and then to OGG Vorbis, they're going to lose 
some parts of the file that they can't afford to lose--because MP3 and 
OGG Vorbis differ /significantly/ in those parts of the original sound 
that they discard. (I'll give you an example: some years ago I acquired 
an excellent recording of the Red Army Chorus singing the State Hymn to 
the USSR. That's an MP3 file. Now if I choose not to get an MP3-friendly 
routine for my copy of XMMS, then what do I do with that file? Play it 
only on a Windows box? Somehow I don't think that's exactly in the 
spirit of Linux.)

That problem isn't going away any time soon. The resolution, if it 
happens at all, will come /only/ when open-source devotees become a big 
enough "market share" that multimedia Webmasters will at least make 
their content available in open-source formats--say, "Click here for the 
MP3 and there for the OGG Vorbis file." And of course it illustrates one 
of the last hurdles that the open-source movement now faces: the 
overwhelming prevalence of closed-source multimedia formats on the 
Internet today.

Temlakos