JLayer should do everything you need. It’s not dead, it’s just stable. The author finished it up quite a long time ago and the MP3 format has not seen much change since. You’ll notice that his MP3SPI codebase is a little more recent. What MP3SPI does, is that translates JLayer’s abilities into JavaSound APIs. Thus you can take any JavaSound code, add MP3SPI to the classpath, and expect that MP3 files will start working. It’s pretty nifty. 🙂