Audacity 3.4.2 on Silicon mac does not recgonise homebrew ffmpeg

Audacity 3 Help Forum
1

Audacity has been working fine for me for weeks, and today it has decided that it doesn’t recognise ffmpeg. I have it installed (via homebrew) I can run it fine, but when I enter the path to libavcodec.dylib in the preferences box, it just ignores me.
I looked at https://lame.buanzo.org (what a terrible website; is that really legit?) but it keeps saying that the ffmpeg libraries are for intel macs only, not the ARM ones. So I’m at a loss what to do, except for using ffmpeg myself to convert my m4a input files to mp3 and then loading them into audacity. No idea why it has suddenly stopped working. Any pointers? Only thing I can think of is that I have applied the MacOS patch to 14.4.1

Running Audacity 3.4.2 on M3 Macbook Pro, MacOS Sonoma 14.4.1 (and I did download the ARM chip version of Audacity).
ffmpeg 7.0 installed via homebrew

2

The Audacity version of FFmpeg has been customized to link to Audacity. (That’s all I know.)

3

I’m not on mac, but this looks like it could be the correct version: https://lame.buanzo.org/ffmpeg.php

4

FFmpeg 7 is not yet supported. You can brew install ffmpeg@6 to install version 6.

5

Hi @LWinterberg – thank you, that does indeed solve it! Hopefully ffmpeg7 support will come soon since v6 is vulnerable to CVE-2024-28661. I guess I must have done a “brew update” since I last ran audacity.

The reason I didn’t use the link supplied by @steve is that that side is only offering ffmpeg v.5.0.0, and I count 14 exploits (FFmpeg Security) affecting v5!

6

FFmpeg7 already is implemented, but didn’t make the cut into 3.5, which may release today. It will make it in the next release which should be out within a month.