ok, at first i tried using amarok and noatun but none of them played mp3, so i tought someting (plugin or somethin) was missing. so a friend of mine told me to get xmms, which is much more like winamp, and plays mp3 default.

now i have xmms installed but when i try to play mp3 files i get this error:
MPEG Layer/1/2/3 Not Supported - Due to patent licensing, and conflicts between such patent licenses and the licenses of application source code, MPEG-1/2 audio layer 3 (mp3) support has been removed from this application by Red Hat, Inc. We apologize for the inconvinience.

And then i went "WTF?". So now mp3 support was removed by Red Hat??? does that mean that ill never be able to play mp3 on fedora 4? ill uninstall it right away!! i mean, what good is an OS system without mp3?!? Is there any way to 'correct' this? Are there other distros that allow mp3? damn, i was loving linux... this sucks.

You're not reading it correctly. RedHat removed the support for mp3 - but hey, this is OpenSource, not any feaky Windows, so you can put it back. It's just that RedHat doesn't want to involve any patent-problems in it's homeland..many free distros other than Fedora/RedHat have that support by default. And you get it into Fedora by getting the plugin for xmms - that's it. Easy. Quick. Simple.

So go for it - google. I don't use Fedora personally so I can't remember where the plugin can be obtained (any of the potential places), but I'd try xmms.org, google, rpm.pbone.net, rpmfind...and friends. Yes, they help often.

But, one more advice - if you're ready to remove Linux because it doesn't play mp3s immediately, and you don't even read the error you posted here carefully enough to understand it fully (or even google for it, which would have brought you the answer), then I'm afraid you should read a bit more about Linux before actually jumping into it.

Linux is a system that has no such limits as Windows has..if you wish to find the limits of Linux, you really got to do hard work. Harder than with Windows..harder than mp3.

see here

done it!
im sorry, i just got all pissed of because i couldnt play mp3 by default, i know ur right, i google it immediatly after the post and found it right away, i think this post was more of an immediate tension relief :s

in fact what had to do was get livna repository access by yum (through rpm install - yum didnt access it by default) and then 'yum install xmms-mp3' like it is explained on fedorafaq.org link above.

also got KDE MP3 players and Rythmbox working.
thx ^^

get the plugins for amarok the same way (might be under gstreamer in yum), i've just converted from xmms, not as lightweight but i like it more