If you don’t listen to music on your computer you can skip this post. Now that we have covered that I would like to talk about playing music. If you are new to linux you will soon find out that your .mp3 files just won’t work. Don’t fret though there is a solution. There is a program called Sound Converter. Sound Converter does exactly what the name says, it converts music files from many different formats to another format. For example you could convert mp3 to FLAC, or .wav to Ogg Vorbis also known as just Ogg.
There are many reasons for doing this, and I am sure that you will find many more than I know. The main reason that I have mentioned is that .mp3 files won’t play on linux natively. Another reason is that you will save a lot of space by converting your music files.
Before you jump right into it you will need to install Sound Converter. There are a couple of ways to do it. You can install it from a Terminal/Konsole. If you have Ubuntu or a Debian based system you can install Sound Converter by tying: sudo apt-get install soundconverter
If you have a distribution that runs on .rpm files, such as Fedora then you can type: su -c 'yum install soundconverter'
However if you don’t feel comfortable with typing commands, don’t worry you will learn in time. Yet you still need to install Sound Converter. To do this you need to open your Add/Remove Programs. To do this in Ubuntu, go to Applications, then click on System Tools, from there choose Add/Remove Programs. If you are using Fedora, go to System, then click on Administration, and choose Add/Remove Programs. Once Add/Remove Programs is open do a search for “soundconverter” without the quotes, find the package put and check-mark in the box next to it.
Once you get Sound Converter installed open it up and you will see: 
This is the main screen for Sound Converter. From here you do everything.
The first think that you need to do is to find out what type of file format you are converting to. To do this you will want to go to the Preferences. To get there you will go to the Edit menu, and choose Preferences. The menu that you will see is this: 
There are a lot of options in there so I will let you play with them to get it set to what you want. The main things you will want to look at are where you are saving the music to, and what format you are saving them in.
Once you have all your setting correct you will want to add some songs or a folder with songs into Sound Converter. To do this you click on the Add File, or Add Folder buttons at the top. For this I am going to be using a song by the band Muse, called Uprising. After you have all your songs ready to go you just have to click on the Convert button.
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Now you have music that is converted to a format that you can play with any of the music players that come with your distribution of linux. I hope that you go out and try this with at least some of your music to make sure that it will work. If you find that it does then you can convert all your music over.
If you have any questions for me about this process or if you have any problems with the install process please leave a comment or shoot me a message and I will try my best to help you.
Cheers!
12 Comments
Just a note:
Converting between lossy formats (such as mp3, Ogg Vorbis etc. ) can be a vewwy wrisky risk in terms of sound quality.
This is extremely cool. Would you be interested in helping us figure out how to help folks create more walkthroughs like this? It’s something I’m hoping the Marketing team will be able to tackle for the F13 cycle, so if you’re interested drop me a line (mchua at fedoraproject dot org) or join the Marketing team and introduce yourself to the list (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Joining_the_Fedora_marketing_project) – I’ll watch for you.
Mel, please see the caveats below. This can’t be done without having MP3 decoding available in the first place – the only way to convert from MP3 to another format is to decode the MP3 first then re-encode to the other format. Also, it causes quality loss if you convert from MP3 to any other lossy format.
It’s still useful in limited circumstances, but it doesn’t solve the ‘you need MP3 codecs’ problem, and it’s not something I’d generally advise most people to do.
Hi,
Thanks a lot for this post; it’s well-written and easy to follow (although I’m afraid I am one of those nerds that Linux isn’t just for…).
About the basis of this post, though, I’m not sure I agree with the advice. I have a large collection of music in various formats, and MP3 is the most prevalent. Re-encoding all of the music would be very time-consuming, and also lead to loss of quality (reencoding one compressed format to another). Perhaps linking to http://www.fedorafaq.org/#mp3 to play these mp3s, and encouraging users to rip or download Vorbis files in the first place is the way forwards?
Carl.
Hi,
Thank you for posting that link. While I know that there are ways to get the plug-ins for mp3 files I would note that they are the “ugly” plug-ins. I feel that since Linux is a free and Open Source OS that we should do the best to keep it that way. The reason that the plug-in is called ugly is because it deals with proprietary software which can’t be torn apart and put back together by the community. So that is why I didn’t write anything about it.
On a side note, converting a lossy(mp3, ogg, etc) formats to another lossy format will reduce the quality no matter what.
Of course converting a lossless(FLAC, WAV, etc) format to a lossless will not loose quality.
A couple of questions:
1. Is this available in the default repositories for Fedora and Ubuntu?
2. How does it handle the codec legal requirements?
3. Is there any loss going from MP3s to Ogg?
4. Can it go the other way (Ogg to MP3)?
If this works as expected then this may be a way for me to convert everything to Ogg format and not have to bother about MP3 format except when I am moving songs into my iPod shuffle but there are a lot of songs that will probably never make it to the iPod so I don’t need to bother converting those.
Hi,
I will admit that I don’t have the answer to all of your questions as I will not admit to know it all. The answer to your first question Yes Sound Converter is available in the default repos of both. As far as the legal requirements, Ogg Vorbis is covered under the “GNU Lesser General Public Licence…is completely free from the licensing or patent issues raised by other proprietary formats such as MP3″ This is taken from Wikipeidias’ article on Ogg Vorbis. As for FLAC it is covered under the new BSD License, and the GPL.
Third, with converting a file from one format to another there is always going to be a little loss of quality. Yes you can convert files from Ogg to MP3 without any problems, but just a little loss in quality.
If your Fedora computer can’t decode MP3 without the codecs, how can it *transcode* it?
This tip is not very useful if it requires the codecs anyway.
Sound Converter is the only human-friendly converter on Linux. Great article! I just wish it also did video encoding…
I wonder if the free MP3 codec from Fluendo would be enough. It may not be FOSS, but it is free and legal for MP3s.
If you want use a mp3 codec then Fluendo would be the one that I would recommend. Have a look at this