Author: JT Smith
“Version 0.2.1 of the Free drop-in replacement for mpg123, mpg321, has
been released. This version of mpg321 is intended to be suitable for release
with Debian woody.”
been released. This version of mpg321 is intended to be suitable for release
with Debian woody.”
Highlights of this release include: * Much higher sound quality. A new, experimental dithering routine has been contributed by Rob Leslie. Thoughts and feedback are appreciated. * Added (non-mpg123) option to skip printing frame status in verbose modes: --skip-printing-frames * BSD and other portability and compilation fixes * Other bug-fixes and enhancements. Source and Debian packages of this release can be downloaded from the Sourceforge project at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=36274 . If you like mpg321, I ask kindly that you make a donation to the Electronic Freedom Foundation, which helps ensure that writing software of any kind remains legal. You can find more information at http://www.eff.org . I am looking for people to help with everything from hard coding tasks (optimization) to easy non-coding tasks (creation of webpages). If you are interested, please read the TODO file or send me an email. mpg321 now has a sourceforge project. To be informed of future releases of mpg321, subscribe to the mpg321-announce mailing list: either send an email with 'subscribe' in the body or subject to mpg321-announce-request@lists.sourceforge.net, or visit http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mpg321-announce . The sourceforge project for mpg321 can be viewed at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpg321 . mpg321 still lacks a few features that mpg123 has; namely * ID3 tag support * Extremely robust and well-tested networking support * Very low resource usage/high-speed decoding and downsampling The first two items are being targetted for version 0.3.0. The last can be helped by further optimizing MAD, in particular. Any and all contributions are welcome. ABOUT MPG321: mpg321 was created to alleviate the dependency many people had on the non-free command-line mp3 player mpg123. It allowed many front-ends to mpg123 to move to the official Debian archive, rather than being relegated to the 'contrib' section. mpg321 is based on the MAD MPEG decoder library by Rob Leslie. In particular, this means that mpg321 uses only integer instructions to decode mp3 files, which is a huge win on any processor which lacks a floating point unit (FPU) like the ARM. It also means that mpg321 has very high output quality, since MAD is a Full Layer III ISO/IEC 11172-3 audio decoder, as defined by the standard. See http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/ for more information. mpg321 uses the libao audio library, developed mainly for the Ogg Vorbis project, for output, which allows it (unlike mpg123) to switch output at runtime. libao natively supports ESD, ALSA, aRts, and OSS output, among others. See the mpg321 manual page for more details. -- Joe Drew
