Getting Audio (mp3) in Fedora 9

This is in my series of posts to get a base fedora install to a comfortable level for Desktop use. If you are a normal user (Normal User = Humans – Ultimate Uber Geeks, who would set up scripts, servers and blah blah before coming to this step) you will need some audio visual experience from your system. So here’s for the audio part…

The base install of fedora does not supply the codecs for proprietary formats like mp3. It does provide support for open formats like OGG but your around-the-corner audio vendor will surely start scratching his head if your ask him for ogg music.

The solution is simple. Install the codecs (duh !!). Livna is a support repository for Fedora which distributes packages which cannot be supplied with Fedora due to patent or other legal issues but can be redistributed under other licences. The codecs and other necessary files are available in two packages

• libtunepimp-extras-nonfree
• xine-lib-extras-nonfree.

Livna maintains a shortcut for the the whole thing. There is a dummy package called

• amarok-extras-nonfree

which has both the aforementioned packages and amarok as dependencies. Amarok is a brilliant music player which is part of the K Desktop Environment (KDE). If you do not have KDE installed, the download through the shortcut will become huge ( >50 MB) because of amarok and core KDE libraries being installed too. In that case you can install just the extras packages, but i would suggest to give amarok a go.

~ by Aman Manglik on May 30, 2008.