Audacity Forum

I just started anew on my desktop computer, which has Windows XP SP2. For some reason when I try to direct Audacity to the lame.dll file to encode mp3s, it says something like "Audacity could not open Mp3 encoding library". I'm using version 1.3.10, which works fine on my laptop. I've tried the lame.dll it directs me to when I press 'download' when directed to find lame.dll, the one at free-codecs.com, and the one on my laptop that I know works there; it gives the exact same error message either way. It worked fine with the same version of Audacity on my desktop before I started over. I've tried deleting the audacity.cfg file, no luck. I've installed Audacity many times before and always gotten it working fine with lame.dll. Why am I suddenly having this problem and what is the fix?

(Note: initially I tried downloading the new 1.3.11 from the website, which was when I first had the problem. Eventually I transferred over the 1.3.10 installer and lame.dll directly from my laptop so they'd be exactly the same; still no luck)

Download the ZIP version of Lame from here: http://lame.buanzo.com.ar/
Extract the Zip file into the same folder as audacity.exe (usually something like C:Program FilesAudacity (beta) )
Restart Audacity and go to "Edit menu > Preferences > Libraries" and use the "Locate" button.

If that doesn't work, don't do anything else, just write back here and let us know exactly what happens.

I actually got it to work by downloading v1.2.6, which accepts lame_enc.dll for some reason. I've already tried using that version of Lame anyway. Tried locating it from Preferences>Libraries and when I try to export mp3s.

The Zip version contains lame_enc.dll , it's just in a ZIP file. The lame_enc.dll file must be "extracted" (unzipped) before you can use it.
The only advantage of the ZIP version over the .exe version is that you extract lame_enc.dll from the zip file manually, which makes it easy to put it exactly where you want it. The .exe version is just a self extracting file that contains the same "lame_enc.dll" file.