Jimmy Wales wrote:
I am willing to defer on this issue to Debian. Can anyone report on whether or not MP3s can be created and played with software that Debian has in their 'free' category?
Mp3s can indeed be both created and played with tools from Debian's 'main' (i.e. completely free, as opposed to 'non-free', which is non-free, or 'contrib', which is free but depends on non-free libraries). One such tool that can do both is Audacity (see [[Audacity]] on de:, en:, fr:, nl:, pl:, or zh:; Debian package 'audacity').
-Mark