Whenever I try to load an mp3 sample, it seems to load an empty file, and doesn’t play it.
Are mp3’s supported under Linux?
There is no native MP3 support in Renoise.
Renoise uses the Quicktime library to decode MP3 files. I thought Linux does not support quicktime or has no library variant that allows import of Mp3.
Taktik said something about it once, but can’t find it anylonger.
If there is Mp3 import, you must install a certain library for it, usually a commonly used one.
Well, I have almost all possible sound decoding libraries installed on my Linux.
Maybe there’s a specific one that needs to be placed in a certain Renoise related directory?
let me pm Taktik for this… I also want to fix this in the docs as well.
edit:it already was in the faq:
Btw: Which external MP3s libary should we use on Linux? Should we go for the liblame or something else? How does Linux handle the license problems with MP3s?
And OGG will always work, its built into Renoise - also on Linux, because there are no license problems.
i was wondering about this too yesterday,glad theres people looking for a solution 
American distributions such as Red Hat tend to avoid the licence issues by not distributing MP3 support and requiring the user to obtain it for themselves. I believe Ubuntu gets around it by being based in a country (South Africa) where MP3 is not patented (or software patents don’t exist).
You should be fine just checking if a library is available and dlopen’ing it if so, since you wouldn’t actually be shipping MP3 code.
mmrn is right, usually the Linux distributions avoid to include the encoders/decoders themselves, but let the user do so if he like. most apps either include the mp3 library support at compile time (but no binaries with static linkage of the mp3 lib) or check in the the library at runtime with relaytool (or something similar).
we should use mpg123 ( http://www.mpg123.de/ ) for decoding and lame for encoding, both are LGPL (so it is ok to use them as external libraries with relaytool) and if the user likes it can get a copy of the library and put in the system, so renoise will be able to use it and encode / decode mp3.
seems neat to me, and we don’t distribute anything patented…