Ubuntu Linux Vs. Windows Vista: The Battle For Your Desktop: Page 11 of 16

Playing MP3s, however, is not something you can do out of the box. It wasn't immediately clear what I could do to fix that, but after some research I found a separate codec pack (called the Gstreamer Plugins package) which solved the problem. Evidently Ubuntu can't be distributed with the MP3 codecs due to licensing restrictions.

Ubuntu Linux		Windows Vista
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Pop in an audio CD and Sound Juicer fires up automatically. By default it just rips CDs to your home directory (/home/), so you may want to create a specific music folder somewhere for it to copy to, which is what I did. Once I got everything set up with the right folders, though, it was a breeze to rip new music to the system and have it automatically identified. Discs that had Unicode metadata showed up correctly, too. This last part is actually pretty important to me, since I have a lot of music from China, Japan, Korea, and other countries that might use non-ASCII song or album titles. There's iPod support through a plug-in; other music devices are essentially handled as large removable drives.

Vista's multimedia components consist of Windows Media Player 11 (WMP) -- best for playing music or whatnot while doing other things -- and Windows Media Center, which is useful if you're using the PC as the center of your entertainment system. WMP has come a long way since its earlier, clunkier incarnations, and version 11 has a lot of things I have come to like. For example, I have a pretty large music library (over 100GB) that I keep ripped to the PC, and WMP's indexed search system lets you find a particular artist or song very quickly. One drawback to WMP is that out of the box it only rips to Microsoft's own WMA format, WAV, or to plain old MP3; the patent-free AAC and Ogg Vorbis formats aren't natively supported for ripping.