Installing Audacity on Windows

Installing Audacity

We were using the G5 to play with some audio and we needed a quick editor/converter so we thought of installing Audacity as we have it on Megatron, the dual xeon running ubuntu 9.04. So off we went to http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/mac to get the osx binary.

Since the G5 is non-intel machine the version is older - only 1.2.6 but we go ahead anyway. The install is the usual, mount the DMG and drag to an Audacity folder in the applications directory. However, we forgot about the Mp3 licensing problem which means you can't export to Mp3 without installing the LAME library. It took a little while to find the library, which was in the pkg format and to download and run the installer.

This is where it gets stupid - the default install is to the sys drive to a lib folder in the usr tree. If you are unfamiliar with those directories it is because they are hidden by default. No problem, except when you run Audacity and go to export it asks you to browse to the folder containing the LAME library - except you can't because they are hidden folders. Years ago with 10.2 i used a utility to turn on/off the hidden files because you always needed to fool around with them as many programs were still X11 instead of native osx. But that was years ago and i never bothered to install X11 wityh 10.5 anyway. Rather than go backward i decide to re-install the library but rather than accept the defaults, to do a custom install to applications/audacity so i could indicate the path of the LAME library to Audacity. Smooth move? Nope - while i can browse to the library location ok, audacity complains that the LAME file is not the correct one. OK so we give up as we are in a hurry and move the audio over to Megatron and do the conversion in a minute as it has both LAME and FFmpeg installed. However, since most of the students will be stuck in windows world maybe we should install Audacity for win xp and write up how it is done.

The problem is the lamelib download has a file called libmp3lame.dylib but that audacity does not like this file and gives an error message "could not open mp3 encoding library". We finally find a lamelib-carbon file but it is in the old stuffit format so now we need to download and install an unstuffit for osx. We discover the open source 'The Unarchiver 1.6.1'. Skip to end...


Audacity in Windows

We download 1.2.6 (which lags behind the linux version) installer and the LAME MP3 encoder (libmp3lame-win-3.98.2.zip) library. Might as well get ffmpeg while we are here. Audacity installs itselft into program files\audacity and we then run LAME which installs itselft into program files\lame for audacity. FFmpeg behaves the same.

We run Audacity and load a wav file. Now to convert and save it as an MP3 file.

1. Select File, Export as MP3 from the menu
2. Choose a location and click SAVE
3. A dialog box asks 'Would you like to locate lame_enc_dll now?. Click YES
4. Browse to C:\program files\lame for audacity
5. Select lame_enc.dll and click OPEN
6. Fill in the metadata and click OK

You now have an Mp3 file. The next test is to record some audio. We have a number of options:

- 'gooseneck' dynamic cardioid desktop microphone
- hand held singer dynamic cardioid mic
- several cheap computer mics
- a headset

First let's check out the sound hardware and software. We goto the sound control panel properties in windows and click on TEST Hardware. The first headset mic is not detected by the wizard. Probably because there is no microphone shown in the volume control.

1. We select Volume Control
2. Select Options, Properties from the menu
3. Place a tick mark in the Microphone box
4. The microphone settings are set to mute by default, we untick the mute
5. Click ADVANCED under the microphone and tick the Mic Boost option

After closing the volume control panel we select Adjust Audio Properties from the taskbar and click on the Voice tab. Now we click Test Hardware again. Eventually the wizard displays a paragraph of text to read.

Now we run audacity and record our sound sample by plugging in a mic and pressing the red record button.

What we should do now is fix the audacity on the mac. Ok now that we have found the correct lame library and a program that handles the stuffit format we are in business.

We install The Unarchiver and set it to handle all archives and then unpack the .sit file and extract lamelib and stick it in audacity. We then select File, Export in Audacity and point it to the location of the file and viola! success at last. We can now export mp3 on the mac, more difficult that it should be but we are there.

The next question is - can we drag the audacity folder to the lab macs and run it? This would solve a lot of problems as students could use the same tool everywhere and anytime. There is also a portable audacity - we would need to test out the osx version of portable apps but i wonder about the utility of editing sound files with it - of course if the file is on the hard drive just the app is running off the stick and it is pretty much all in ram anyway.