From:	 Joe Drew <hoserhead@woot.net>
To:	 mpg321-announce@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: mpg321 0.2.3 released
Date:	 05 Dec 2001 00:06:01 -0500
Cc:	 lwn@lwn.net, editors@newsforge.com

Version 0.2.3 of the Free drop-in replacement for mpg123, mpg321, has
been released. This version contains fixes to several bugs and deficiencies
in previous versions of mpg321.

Highlights of this release include:
* All streams are now played to their actual end, regardless of what the 
  calculated estimate of their length is
* Integration of a patch from Martijn Vernooij implementing line buffering
  in remote control mode (front-ends need no longer consider the remote
  control interface serial, though it is probably still possible to over-
  whelm it)
* An implementation of the --stereo command-line switch, which forces stereo
  output on all streams
* Various mpg123-correctness and portability fixes
* Various bugfixes, including several segfaults

mpg321 now has a webpage, available at http://mpg321.sourceforge.net .
Thanks to Olli Rajala, who created the pages.

mpg321 can be downloaded from 
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=36274 .

To be informed of future releases of
mpg321, subscribe to the mpg321-announce mailing list: either send an email
with 'subscribe' in the body or subject to 
mpg321-announce-request@lists.sourceforge.net , or visit
http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mpg321-announce .

If you like mpg321, I ask kindly that you make a donation to the Electronic
Freedom Frontier, which helps ensure that writing software of any kind 
remains legal. You can find more information at http://www.eff.org .

I am looking for people to help with everything involved in creating
mpg321, particularly in creation of RPMs for various RPM-based
distributions. If you are interested in this or any other task, please read
the TODO file or send me an email.

mpg321 still lacks a few features that mpg123 has; namely
* ID3 tag support
* Extremely robust and well-tested networking support
* Very low resource usage/high-speed decoding and downsampling

The first two items are being targetted for version 0.3.0. The last can
be helped by further optimizing MAD, in particular. Any and all
contributions are welcome.

ABOUT MPG321:

mpg321 was created to alleviate the dependency many people had on the
non-free command-line mp3 player mpg123. It allowed many front-ends to
mpg123 to move to the official Debian archive, rather than being
relegated to the 'contrib' section. 
mpg321 is based on the MAD MPEG decoder library by Rob Leslie
<rob@mars.org>. In particular, this means that mpg321 uses only integer
instructions to decode mp3 files, which is a huge win on any processor
which lacks a floating point unit (FPU) like the ARM. It also means that
mpg321 has very high output quality, since MAD is a Full Layer III
ISO/IEC 11172-3 audio decoder, as defined by the standard. See
http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/ for more information.
mpg321 uses the libao audio library, developed mainly for the Ogg Vorbis
project, for output, which allows it (unlike mpg123) to switch output at
runtime. libao natively supports ESD, ALSA, aRts, and OSS output, among
others. See the mpg321 manual page for more details. 

-- 
Joe Drew <hoserhead@woot.net> <drew@debian.org>

Please encrypt email sent to me.