Fortunately that is not difficult. And even more fotunate, here are the instructions.

The first thing you need to is close out all applications that might want to make use of an mp3 file. This could include Ryhthmbox, Amarok, Banshee, or xmms. Now open a terminal window because you are going to be issuing some commands in a moment. Once the terminal window is open you will first need to su to root. With root privileges it is time to get down to business.

The first set of commands to run will install the necessary repositories for yum to use. First issue:

rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Once that command completes issue:

rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rmpfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Now it’s time to install the actual plugins for support. Issue the command:

yum -y install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly xine-lib-extras-nonfree

Now your system will allow mp3 playback in the major players. But there is still no xmms. To install xmms with mp3 support issue the following command:

yum install xmms xmms-mp3

Once this is finished your machine is all ready for full-blown mp3 playback in just about every type of application.

Final Thoughts

Yes it’s true it would be nice if the major Linux distributions could ship with mp3 support built in. But that is not the case due to licensing. Fortunately getting this working is as simple as a few commands.

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