Hi, I would like to report a bug. I have a 2.3 version. I made a lot of this with an mp3 track, cuts, effects etc. When I would like to export (save) it to an MP3 file the application needs a DLL file. I downloaded it and add to your app. But unfortunately all of my work is lost at this point.
In order to export to MP3 you need to download and run [u]Lame_v3.99.3_for_Windows.exe[/u] . That will install LAME.
It may be lost now, but you could have exported to WAV or you could have saved your Audacity project… And, I assume you still have the original files.
Everybody can play MP3s, but making a new one is, or was until very recently, a paid license. Because Audacity is free, we can’t “hide” the licensing fees in the purchase price. Lame is a work-alike software package that you can add to Audacity to allow Exporting to MP3 without running into licensing conflicts.
Audacity is a production and project editor not a WAV editor. That gives you the ability to Save Projects but you need to separate the work from the project in order to make, or export, a sound file.
MP3 is one way to do that, but MP3 files make terrible edit masters. MP3 creates sound damage and it gets worse every time you edit it. Much better Export a WAV (Microsoft) 16-bit file first as edit master and then, if you still need to, a MP3 so you can enjoy the work on the beach or mail it to someone.
MP3 is an end product, not a step in the middle.
A common New User mistake is to open your original sound files (voice recordings, songs), edit them and then save the corrections back to the original files. That’s a terrible idea because if anything goes wrong, you could lose the current edit, the imported files and the original recordings. Clean sweep all the way back to sing it again.
Only edit or change copies of original files. Keep original recordings in a safe place.
Koz
Although I am an occasional user of Audacity, I think it is well worth a donation. I recently turned to it to slow down some of the audio recordings in my German course. This it did very well by reducing the tempo by 20%. I was using version 2.2.1-1 which I obtained from the repositories in Lubuntu 18.04LTS Linux. One of my fellow students was interested, so I thought that I had better check that the Windows 10 version 2.3.0. functioned in the same way. Although it worked fine, there was the additional complication of finding and downloading the LAME .dll. The installation in Linux had been very straightforward and LAME appears to be installed with Audacity. I thought that the mp3 copyright and licence had recently lapsed. If this is so, could the Windows installation be simplified? Not all of my fellow (adult) students are very computer-minded.
Regards.
Indeed, our understanding too is that the copyright had lapsed - but there are commercial considerations (too complicated to go into here) as to why we don’t want to do this right now. But it is something we are strongly considering for the future.
WC