Enabling MP3 Support In CentOS

As you know, I’ve been getting to grips with CentOS, the Community ENTerprise Operating System.

Another little foible that CentOS inherits from Red Hat Enterprise is that it doesn’t include native support for MP3 playback. Again, down to legality/licensing issues. Damn those lawyers!

I did a bit of searching around, and there are a couple of fixes/work-arounds available to enable MP3 support in CentOS Linux. The one which worked out of the box for me was the XMMS MP3 plugin at Guru Labs. For my version of CentOS, I took an educated guess and installed the files for Red Hat Linux 9. This was a straight RPM package which I downloaded and installed.

Immediately afterward, the XMMS program was able to play my MP3 collection from my NTFS partition! I’m starting to enjoy this Linux stuff!