Mpg123

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mpg123

Latest release:	0.65 / February 7, 2007
OS:	Unix, Mac OS X, Windows
Use:	Audio Player
License:	GNU Lesser General Public License
Website:	www.mpg123.org

The correct title of this article is mpg123. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

mpg123 is a fast, free, minimalist, console MPEG audio player software program for UNIX and Linux operating systems. It supports MPEG-1 and -2, layers 1, 2 and 3. Its most common use is to play MP3 files.

mpg123 appeared after the first MP3 player for UNIX, MAPlay, and quickly came into widespread use, as it relied heavily on assembler optimizations to perform the iDCT part of the MPEG decoding quicker than any other MP3 player. This makes it probably the most resource-efficient MP3 player and library there is. The core of mpg123 is used by XMMS for MP3 playback.

The license of the last stable version by the original author is GPL for the mpg123 player and the license of the mpglib inside the mpg123 package is LGPL.

The official development of the mpg123 software had ceased for several years and there accumulated some serious security holes that were only fixed by third party developers, p.ex. in the Debian and Gentoo Linux packages.

In 2006, a new maintainer was found and work started again on releasing a new official mpg123 package under LGPL license.

Its core is used in a number of projects such as in_!mpg123. The FreeBSD ports collection includes an extensive patch set to fix known bugs and security issues.