mpg123 is a fast, free

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 and console MPEG audio player

Audio player (software)

An audio player is a kind of media player for playing back digital audio, including optical discs such as CDs, SACDs, DVD-Audio, HDCD, audio files and streaming audio....

 software program for UNIX

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 and Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

s. mpg123 was ported to the Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 platform using Cygwin

Cygwin

Cygwin is a Unix-like environment and command-line interface for Microsoft Windows. Cygwin provides native integration of Windows-based applications, data, and other system resources with applications, software tools, and data of the Unix-like environment...

 and MinGW

MinGW

MinGW , formerly mingw32, is a native software port of the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Binutils for use in the development of native Microsoft Windows applications; MinGW can function either as a cross compiler targeting Windows or as a native toolchain run on Windows itself...

. It supports MPEG-1

MPEG-1

MPEG-1 is a standard for lossy compression of video and audio. It is designed to compress VHS-quality raw digital video and CD audio down to 1.5 Mbit/s without excessive quality loss, making video CDs, digital cable/satellite TV and digital audio broadcasting possible.Today, MPEG-1 has become...

 and -2

MPEG-2

MPEG-2 is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods which permit storage and transmission of movies using currently available storage media and transmission...

, layers 1, 2 and 3

MP3

MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

. Its most common use is to play MP3

MP3

MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

 files. It also comes as a Winamp

Winamp

Winamp is a media player for Windows-based PCs and Android devices, written by Nullsoft, now a subsidiary of AOL. It is proprietary freeware/shareware, multi-format, extensible with plug-ins and skins, and is noted for its graphical sound visualization, playlist, and media library features.Winamp...

 plugin.

mpg123 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

XMMS

The X Multimedia System is a free audio player for Unix-like systems.-History:XMMS was originally written as X11Amp by Peter and Mikael Alm in November 1997. The player was made to resemble Winamp, which was first released in May that year. As such, XMMS has supported Winamp 2 "classic" skins...

 for MP3 playback.

The license of the last stable version (0.59r) by the original author is GPL

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

 for the mpg123 player and the license of the mpglib inside the mpg123 package is LGPL

GNU Lesser General Public License

The GNU Lesser General Public License or LGPL is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation . It was designed as a compromise between the strong-copyleft GNU General Public License or GPL and permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License...

. 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

Debian

Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...

 and Gentoo Linux

Gentoo Linux

Gentoo Linux is a computer operating system built on top of the Linux kernel and based on the Portage package management system. It is distributed as free and open source software. Unlike a conventional software distribution, the user compiles the source code locally according to their chosen...

 packages, as well as the FreeBSD ports

FreeBSD Ports

The FreeBSD Ports collection is a package management system for the FreeBSD operating system, providing an easy and consistent way of installing software packages. As of October 2011, there are over 22,700 ports available in the collection...

 collection.

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.

See also

• Comparison of audio player software
  Comparison of audio player software
  The following comparison of audio players compares general and technical information for a number of software media player programs.For the purpose of this comparison, "audio players" are defined as any media player which can only play audio files...
  
  
• ogg123
• madplay
  MPEG Audio Decoder
  MPEG Audio Decoder is a GPL library to decode files that have been encoded with an MPEG audio codec, written by Robert Leslie and produced by Underbit Technologies. It was developed as a new implementation, on the ISO/IEC standards....
  
  
• mpg321

External links

• Official Website
• Otachan's in_!mpg123: An MP3
  MP3
  MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
  
   decoder for Winamp
  Winamp
  Winamp is a media player for Windows-based PCs and Android devices, written by Nullsoft, now a subsidiary of AOL. It is proprietary freeware/shareware, multi-format, extensible with plug-ins and skins, and is noted for its graphical sound visualization, playlist, and media library features.Winamp...
  
  , based on mpg123