I'm on a PC and for the life of me can't figure out why Real Player, Winamp nor iTunes will not play MPEG Layer 3 Audio files.

I've got heaps and heaps of music in different formats (FLAC, mp3, winamp media file, WAVE audio file, MPEG Layer 3 Audio files). <<BTW, what's the difference between a regular mp3 file and MPEG Layer 3?>>

I'd like to have just ONE Player that can play all of my files without me having to do conversions. Is there a program that can accomplish this? especially one that is shareware.

I also play a lot of this music on a MacBook Pro; any Mac folks out there that use a similar program to play all their various file formats?

Thanks a Million.

Michael

I think I've got a file encoding problem from what I'm reading on the Web. I'm thinking that the file named MPEG Layer 3 is actually MPEG 2 since there's no such thing as an MPEG Layer 3.

So the question is, how do I convert all these files I have in one batch as opposed to converting one at a time?

One solution I saw was to rename the file to .mp2, but I can't figure out how to do that.

"What we commonly call an "MP3 file" (that is, a file with a ".mp3" extension) is, from a strictly file format point-of-view, actually an MPEG-1 file or an MPEG-2 file which just happens to contain MPEG Layer III audio data (as opposed to MPEG Layer I audio data or MPEG Layer II audio data). (...) Which type of file, MPEG-1 or MPEG-2, a given (properly named) .mp3 file is, is dependent upon the encoding parameters chosen at the time the file was created. The parameters which determine whether the MP3 encoding software will produce an MPEG-1 file or an MPEG-2 file are the sampling rate (measured in kHz or kilohertz - thousands of cycles per second), the datarate (or bitrate, measured in kbps or kilo bits per second - thousands of bits per second), and the number of audio channels (one channel for monaural or two channels for stereophonic)."

Do you mean MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3? If so there is no difference. MP3 is the common name for MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3.


It all comes down to licenses. RealPlayer, for example, won't release their code to developers so it's very hard to incorporate it into a third party application. Some developers get round this by "emulating" a RealPlayer player or plug-in for another application.

Winamp is probably your best option, then if you have a file format that it won't play, search through the plug-in section to see if someone as written an add-on.

I can't help you on the Mac issue though as I've never used one.

Thanks.

My main issue is that Winamp won't play the music files that say "MPEG Layer 3"

I think you're saying that there's a plug-in I should have in order to play these files.

I just don't understand how this MPEG Layer 3 is different from mp3 files.

my mp3 files will play in winamp.

Michael

What is the file extension of your "MPEG Layer 3" files?