From Slashdot:

"The licensing terms of Thomson and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, who are the owners of the mp3 patents, have changed. Now not only mp3 encoders but also mp3 decoders require a license. This page lists the fees -- it's $0.75 per decoder. As a consequence, Red Hat has already removed all mp3 players from the Rawhide development version."

Everyone, move to OGG, and abandon MP3, OGG is better anyway.

ogg is good. switch now.

http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/software.html

thats the page that lists the fees btw

Like people won't just work around it by using the software they already have.

Does this mean that we will have to pay for winamp?

ogg is good. switch now

Too late, soo much mp3.. so little ogg, what is ogg anyway?

http://www.vorbis.org

No, you wont have to pay for winamp, cos they are backed by a large organisation, they can afford the liscence. Not many other freeware developers can tho.

Actually, it was never the fact that you had to pay for the mp3 patent when creating a software decoder.

The license holders only chage money to those who sell a product using mp3 technology. For example , hardware decoders (portable mp3 players). And this has always been the case, ever since the beginning.

The only thing that has changed is that they took the words out of the web page about how software (free) decoders were free.

ogg's better ne ways.

uhhh, exactly?

yes but sadly the winamp ogg vorbis decoder plugins aren't anywhere NEAR as advanced in terms of options and quality as the bam decoder or whatever..

plus, "this friend has a lot of mp3s" and i.. err.. "he" doesn't want to f***ing convert them all to ogg unless he (a) has to or (b) has a really good program to do so


hmm

If i wrote a program to do massive batch conversions of mp3s to ogg vorbis would anyone use it? because the libraries are out there to do it..

go back to uni defugg d:
do some work

leave me and my mp3s alone, i dun wanna have to fscking convert them all the time i wanna wack them on my mp3 player (a physical one not a proggie)

If i wrote a program to do massive batch conversions of mp3s to ogg vorbis would anyone use it? because the libraries are out there to do it..

yes

If i wrote a program to do massive batch conversions of mp3s to ogg vorbis would anyone use it? because the libraries are out there to do it..

Ahhh.. no. That wouldn't make any sense now would it. Ogg is higher quality for less file size, but you are not going to get better quality from an mp3. More sound is not going to just appear out of no-where. In fact, on the ogg vorbis site it explicitly recommends not converting mp3 to ogg, because although the file size will be smaller, the quality will be slightly less. Ogg needs to be made from preferably the original source, or .wav

how the hell do all these people suddenly know about ogg? it has never even been mentioned here before.

woah maen you mean to say the internet is more than just qgl.org?

what other site do you go to?