Fedora 25 Finally Makes MP3 Playback Easy, Fedora 26 Might Ship It By Default

Fedora 25 has a lot going for it and yet another benefit for Fedora Workstation users on the desktop is finally having an easy, official path for MP3 playback support. It's 2016 and there's finally good MP3 support coming through official channels, after in Fedora 24 they were able to finally provide H.264 support via OpenH264.

While there have been third-party repositories and other means for enabling MP3 playback on Fedora, nothing official up to this point for the community-focused distribution backed by Red Hat. Today, Red Hat's Christian Schaller blogged Mp3 support now coming to Fedora Workstation 25.

This MP3 playback support is coming via the mpeg123 library plus GStreamer integration and doesn't provide any MP3 encoding capabilities. The MP3 plug-in will be offered through GNOME Software and the missing codec installer found in GStreamer-powered applications.

So it's not by default, but it's easily accessible without jumping through any extra hoops like third-party repos. Christian noted in his post, "For Fedora Workstation 26 I would not be surprised if we decide to ship it on the install media."

Fedora had gone without MP3 support these years due to patent/licensing concerns. Those details via this Fedora Wiki page.