14 DAY TRIAL // On November 10, 2016, Fedora, Red Hat and GStreamer developer Christian Schaller reports that the Workstation edition of the upcoming Fedora 25 Linux operating system is coming with MP3 support by default.
According to Mr. Schaller, who reminds us that the current stable release of Fedora Workstation, version 24, includes the open-source OpenH264 H.264 implementation for H.264 decoding and encoding, Fedora 25 Workstation is shipping with a new plugin that should allow for playback of MP3 audio files.
It appears that MP3 support in Fedora Linux has been a long requested feature, and, after so many years, it will finally be available in the forthcoming Fedora 25 release which, unfortunately, was delayed earlier today by a week. However, it doesn't ship by default, so users will need to install the MP3 plugin via GNOME Software.
"I know this has been a big wishlist item for a long time for a lot of people, so I am really happy that we are finally in a position to fulfill that wish," wrote Christian Schaller on his blog. "You should be able to download the MP3 plugin on day 1 through GNOME Software or through the missing codec installer in various GStreamer applications."
MP3 support could land by default in Fedora 26 Workstation
Unfortunately, the new MP3 plugin is only for playback of audio files encoded with the MPEG-2 Audio Layer III codec, which means that there won't be encoding support at this time. The implementation is possible through a plugin for the GStreamer multimedia framework and the mpeg123 library, both of which use the same license.
Future plans include support for additional MP3 decoders in the Fedora Linux distribution if users request them and there are developers willing to implement extra MP3 functionality, but in some more good news, it looks like Fedora Project is planning to ship MP3 support by default in the Fedora 26 Workstation install media.