Audacity, and avoiding the trap in NO MP3 support, in Fedora

There are 2 versions in Fedora for Audacity install - the free and non-free.

If you want to be able to import audio in the MP3 format (there may be other formats other than MP3 that are supported), make sure you select the non-free version of Audacity in the Software list, named:
audacity-freeworld-2.0.0-1.fc18

as opposed to the free version I installed named
audacity-2.0.2-2.fc18

Correcting my mistake of installing the free version of Audacity, I first suspected to add MP3 codecs support in my system doing this (gotten from a DuckDuckGo search):

su -
yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly

Yes, it did find some packages to download, and yes, it did install.  This probably worked because I already installed the RPMFusion package beforehand (see my earlier post).
 
But it didn't fix the problem: going back to Audacity and attempting a MP3 import still produced the error message, "This version of Audacity was not compiled with mp3 support."

This fixed the problem, based on a tip found in the Fedora Forums.

su - 

yum remove audacity
yum install audacity-nonfree

Fedora, Skype, and my fave resource site

Before I forget, the site if not true then false deserves much of my admiration. This guy has helped me through all my Fedora installation struggles.

For the latest Fedora release, installing Skype proved easier by following his instructions.

Only thing missing from his Skype-Fedora guide was that right before step 1.3, I had to also do a "yum install wget" in the terminal, as I didn't have the wget app in the fresh Fedora installation.

Fedora 18, cinnamon desktop, play some music

My, how time flies. I didn't realize this would be my first post for 2013. Maybe life presents itself outside Linux and blogging more days now than before. Installation notes on Fedora 18:

1. Using a Samsung netbook (without the benefit of a built-in or portable DVD reader), I download the live 32 bit of this distro and also the Windows USB creator.

Links: Gnome 32 bit Fedora 18 liveusb creator

2. Burned the ISO on USB, using the liveUSB creator tool of Fedora, and booted the netbook with the USB.

3. After the installation, which proceeded with incident, I installed my fave apps from the software utility of Fedora (e.g. Gimp, Phatch)

4. Also using the Software app of Fedora (you would think they would come up with a more imaginative name like Fedora Download Center, or something)

5. The core of this post, though, is making my audio (music) files in my iPod to play using Fedora's Rhythmbox app. It kept asking for MP3 codecs that were unfortunately not part of the default installation.

5.1 It seemed simple enough, after mistakenly trying to install an older (i.e. Fedora 16 package) of RPM Fusion. Luckily going to their site, I saw that the packages for the Fedora 18 distro was available. Clicked on the free and non-free packages, each download not saved as files, but executed (in Firefox) with Open with -> Software Install (default) option.

5.2 Then after that, open a terminal, type "su -" for root access, then enter the root password.

5.3 Then type "yum install vlc".

5.4 Still when I play music directly using Rhythmbox, it complains needing MP3 codecs. So I click on the Search button, and let Fedora do its thing downloading and installing the necessary packages.

Now enjoying the music! ;-)