On 08/29/2007 06:52 AM, Frank K wrote: > Thanks to both of you for your responses. Following Volker's advice I > downloaded lame-3.97-1.suse10.2.i586.rpm from Kradio. It's installed > now, but Xine and Banshee are still looking for an mp3 decoder. The man > page for lame shows it to be a converter of other sound files to mp3. More a producer than a converter. LAME's the (kind of) program that produces MP3 files. It encodes raw, uncompressed digital audio such as found on CDs for example (and sometimes also known as "PCM") to the compressed audio format MP3. As a "bonus", it also accepts MP2 or MP3 files as input but that's just for convenience (and a bad idea -- see below). > Since I can't hear the mp3 files I have, I don't see how this helps. > Man lame also mentions mpg123 and madplay. Neither are in the Suse10.2 > distribution. These appear to be mp3 players. Yes, those are command line MP3 players. Amarok, XMMS, AlsaPlayer and many more players are also available for the GUI. > What is the decoder Xine and Banshee think they are missing? Try if this is useful: http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/MP3_on_SUSE_Linux_10.2 More generally though, the answer's "no idea", as this is completely distribution specific and moreover not at all related to ALSA. See, the trouble is -- MP3 is a proprietary, patent encumbered format for which (sometimes) licensing fees have to be payed to some unclear number of parties and as such, free distributions have trouble supplying MP3 support out of the box. The trouble you are having now is the kind of trouble usage of these and similar formats land people in. > Rene, I'm thinking that mp3 files would need to be converted to Ogg > Vorbis? No, I wouldn't really advice that. Both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis are "lossy" compression formats, which means they both leave out some of the information from the original uncompressed source audio. Exactly what and how much they leave out is what makes them different. Obviously, if your source form is one lossy format, any re-encoding to another lossy format could only leave out more which means you should expect to end up with a worse sounding file. Generally it won't be bad, so for casual use transcoding MP3 to Ogg Vorbis can be okay, but as a rule you shouldn't. Always encode directly from the source, which normally means from the CD. If you don't have the source, chances are fairly high the MP3 was illegally distributed to you in the first place, so you don't get to complain about anything and nobody cares about your needs anyway :-) > Can "OV" do that or would that conversion require another application in > need of an mp3 decoder? Dunno what "OV" is, but as said, I'd not transcode anything. The normal application to encode from PCM to Ogg Vorbis is "oggenc". Really off-topic this, so I hope the link above is useful. If not, you're best of following up to some SuSE specific list/forum. Rene. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Alsa-user mailing list Alsa-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user
