mpg123 is a audio player software for UNIX and Linux operating systems, and nowadays also a software library for inclusion in other media players. mpg123 plays, as the name states MPEG audio Layer 1, 2 and 3. The most common use is to play back MP2 and MP3 files.

mpg123 appeared after the first MP3 player for UNIX, MAPlay , and quickly came into widespread use, as it relied heavily on assembler optimizations to perform the iDCT part of the MPEG decoding quicker than any other MP3 player. Today, mpg123 contains assembler optimizations for almost every popular CPU on the market. This makes it probably the most resource-efficient MP3 player and library there is. The core of mpg123 is used by XMMS for MP3 playback.

The license of the mpg123 player is GPL and the license of the mpglib inside the mpg123 package is LGPL. Some Linux distributions (including Debian) ship with mpg321 instead because it is released under the GNU General Public License.

The development of mpg123 had ceased and there are some serious security holes in mpg123 that were not fixed.

See also

• List of audio players
• Comparison of media players

External links

• mpg123, Fast MP3 Player for Linux and UNIX systems