As such, it provides plugins for both encoding and decoding a variety of audio formats, including mp3. gstreamer is essentially a plugin-based audio routing library. GstreamerĪnother option to supporting mp3's is through gstreamer. I sure am not a lawyer, so I can only judge based upon prior projects, of which Audacity is a relevant one to reference. So if we want mp3 support before the patents expire, we could go with a similar approach to Audacity if all the developers are comfortable with it.
Additionally, that same page says that Thomson (the patent enforcer) permits mp3 encoding for "personal" use, which a decent portion of LMMS users do. This appears to remove responsibility from the developers of Audacity over patent licensing, instead pushing that responsibility to the users that are affected (i.e. They explain the reasoning briefly at the top of this page. A popular open source tool, Audacity, is able to provide mp3 encoding through LAME by detecting its presence on the system at runtime instead of shipping precompiled binaries. According to Wikipedia, distributing LAME in compiled form along with LMMS would likely be in violation of the US patents. Now, there is a non-commercial (LGPL-licensed) mp3 encoder/decoder, LAME. However, the patents have already expired in most other countries, and may have never applied to some countries. Other sources ( liftarn's comment) indicate that September 2015 is the month that mp3-related patents expire in the U.S. sometime before 2018 (the last one expires 30/Dec/2017), according to this source. These patents are all scheduled to expire in the U.S. In order to do either option, you must obtain a license. The discussion on #1471 recently led to some talk over the possibility of supporting the mp3 file format (specifically in decoding samples, but it also has use as an export option).įor those that don't know, there are a variety of patents associated with encoding and decoding mp3's. Import tracks as mp3 via SampleTrack, AudioFileProcessor.Export song to mp3 via CLI( Implement command line export for MP3 (#2000) #3641).Export song to mp3 via GUI ( Implement #2000 ("Add mp3 encoding and/or decoding support") #3615).
Since LAME is available on all platforms, LAME will be used and bundled to provide this functionality.
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