Why Fedora have not mp3 support?

People who migrate from Windows to Fedora wonder why doesn't Fedora have mp3 support. Even I wondered for the first time because most of the audio/songs I use have mp3 format. Fedora is maintaining a page as users are coming with same question again and again. You can see the Fedora answer here.

Those who don't have patience to read, here goes what the page says. Mp3 format is patented content and the owner is not allowing full grant to use.

Work around for the problem

By default most versions of Fedora comes with RhythmBox music player. The icon looks like a speaker emitting sound waves. Using this player you can play open audio file formats like ogg and flac. You will get those audio formats from Wikipedia and some free content servers. To make RhythmBox support mp3 format, Open Terminal and switch to administer user.

su

yum --nogpgcheck install http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly

Commands explanation

After you give the first command 'su' it will ask for password. You need to enter the root or administrator password. 

The next step is configuring YUM. Official Fedora repository doesn't has mp3 decoder so you are installing third party repository - Livina and RpmFusion where you will get mp3 decoders.

Last step is installation of mp3 decoder. The last command gstreamer-plugins-ugly will make your RhythmBox player to understand/play mp3 file formats.