Install Audacity and enable MP3 encoding on Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin



Audacity is useful digital audio-editing application, available for free on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and BSD. It’s quite easy to install on Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. Merely use this command from a Terminal window:

sudo apt-get install audacity

(If you don’t know how to find a Terminal window, click on the “Dash”, the Ubuntu icon on the upper-lefthand corner of your screen, and search for Terminal. You can also hit the CTRL+ALT+T keys at your desktop to launch a Terminal window.)

This will download and install Audacity and its dependencies from the Ubuntu repositories. Once finished, you can run Audacity by going to the Dash, searching for “Audacity”, and double-clicking on the Audacity icon.

However, the default install of Audacity lacks the ability to export its projects as an MP3 file. To gain that functionality, you’ll need to install the LAME library, which gives Audacity the ability to encode MP3 files. Note that the ownership of the MP3 patents remain in some dispute, so there may be liability issues in using LAME. However, if you’re in the legal clear, you can use this Terminal command to install the LAME library:

sudo apt-get install libmp3lame0

This will gave Audacity the ability to export projects as MP3 files.

-JM

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One Response to Install Audacity and enable MP3 encoding on Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

  1. Jean says:

    Thanks! You helped me

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