Believe it or not, mpg123 is an open source command-line music playback software capable of decoding and playing MPEG Audio Layer 1, 2 and 3 files, which are popularly known as MP3s, designed to run entirely in a Linux console.
Features at a glance
Key features include an audio decoding library for the MPEG Audio Layer 1, 2 and 3, real time audio player for the MPEG 1.0, 2.0 and 2.5 formats, floating point and integer math support, high-quality and fast audio playback, as well as support for a wide range of Linux and UNIX-like operating systems.
Command-line options
Among the application’s built-in command-line options, we can mention the ability to write output to a WAV file, skip first n frames, downsample 1:2 (22 kHz), play every n’th frame only, mix both channels (mono), enable control keys, shuffle play (with wildcards), read URLs, decode channel 0 (left) only, use HTTP authentication, set the output buffer, set or force the samplerate, and check range violations.
Under the hood and availability
While the application is written entirely in the C programming language, it uses several special optimizations like SSE, 3DNow or ARM, and supports GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, AIX, OS/2, HP-UX, SGI Irix, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows operating systems.
It is available for download as a source archive, which means that the user must configure, compile and install the application via the Linux/UNIX command-line. However, it can be easily installed from the default software repositories of many Linux OSes.
Bottom line
Summing up, we have no idea who will this command-line audio player in a world full of modern graphical user interfaces, but we are quite certain that mpg123 offers a very good audio quality and it’s extremely easy to use even if you hate the Linux Terminal.
