mpg123

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mpg123

Latest release	1.4.3 / May 22, 2008
OS	Unix, Mac OS X, Windows
Genre	Audio Player
License	GNU Lesser General Public License
Website	mpg123.org

mpg123 is a fast, free, minimalist, console MPEG audio player software program for UNIX and Linux operating systems. mpg123 was ported to the Windows platform using cygwin and mingw. It supports MPEG-1 and -2, layers 1, 2 and 3. Its most common use is to play MP3 files. It also comes as a Winamp plugin.

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 (0.59r) by the original author is GPL for the mpg123 player and the license of the mpglib inside the mpg123 package is LGPL. But in the past the licence was not fully free, although source code was available.

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. Notable changes have been available in the Debian and Gentoo Linux packages, as well as the FreeBSD ports collection.

Its core is used in a number of projects such as MPlayer, LAME or _!mpg123 for Winamp.

In 2006, a new maintainer was found and work started again on releasing a new official mpg123 package under LGPL license. End of 2007, after several releases under LGPL in the 0.6x series that included all known security fixes, a version 1.0 has been released under LGPL, with libmpg123 as a full-featured replacement for mpglib.