Being an avid music lover, one of the first things I do when I install Linux, is setup mp3 playback. Due to licensing concerns (which I’m not going to get into here), Red Hat/Fedora don’t ship with mp3 support, even though they ship with multiple audio players.

The other day I decided to install Fedora 8 on the laptop, as there’s really nothing that I need to do, that I can’t do under Linux.

I decided to use Rhythmbox for my audio player as I’d read good things about it. It includes the ability to transfer music to and from my iPod.

So the first thing to do was to install Rhythmbox using yum:


[jay@mobility ~]$ su -
Password:
[root@mobility ~]# yum install rhythmbox


That will install all of the required dependencies, excluding mp3 support. But don’t panic, mp3 support is just around the corner, thanks to the codeina application shipped with Fedora 8.

If codeina isn’t installed, first install it with yum:

[root@mobility ~]# yum install codeina


Once codeina is installed, run it:

[root@mobility ~]# codeina


Then install the free mp3 codec it offers. The interface is very simple to use, here’s a screenshot:

That’s it, you should now have working mp3 support in Fedora 8 using Rhythmbox!

Now I realise that there are many other audio players, and many other audio codecs for playing back mp3′s, but this was the solution that fit my needs, and worked for me

You should note that the other codecs offered in the codeina installer cost money, but the mp3 one is free.

–jay