THE UBUSTU FEED

Here’s another “while we wait” how-to inspired by the comments in a previous post. It even took us a little bit of digging to find so we figured we would set this valuble morsel of information free. If you don’t know already, LAME is a very slick Mp3 encoder. Oddly, the acronym stands for “LAME Ain’t no Mp3 Encoder.”

Who leaves out Mp3 support? Sheesh!

Audacity does not support Mp3 encoding ‘out of the box.’ This is because Audacity, like Ubuntu, is released under an open source license which prohibits the distrubution of any proprietary file or code. Due to its widespread use, you wouldn’t think .mp3 was a proprietary format. But it is!

Just to clarify, this tutorial will enable LAME capabilities for any software that supports it. Ok! The first thing we’ll want to do is grab the tarball of the latest version (right click > save as will not work) :

/sourceforge/lame/lame-3.97.tar.gz

Now, from the Desktop, right click lame-3.97.tar.gz and select ‘Extract Here.’ Open the Terminal and change directories into the LAME source code folder we just extracted :

cd Desktop/lame-3.97

Before we can start, we need to download the build-essential package, a collection of tools that we’ll need in order to compile LAME from the source :

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Now you’re ready to configure, make, and install LAME onto your system :

./configure --prefix=$HOME/local && make && make install

That’s it! Now any program that supports encoding via LAME will now have access to its magic. We’ve installed it into the Home folder because we just don’t feel right installing propreitary anything in root!

How to let Audacity know you’re ready to encode

To point Audacity in the right direction, open a non-Mp3 file and then try to ‘Export as Mp3.’ Choose where you want to save and click OK. It will then ask you if you would like to locate libmp3lame.so, click yes and browse to /home/yourusername/local/lib and you’re set for life.