audacity will not accept lame_enc.dll

[donnybrook098]

first I told Audacity where the file was but it kept saying "could not open MP3 encoding library". so I went to the Audacity online tutorial & it said to go to audacity/edit/preferences/file formats/find library, which I did, but it doesn't seem to recognize the lame_enc.dll file because it still says "mp3 exporting plugin not found". I tried uninstalling & reinstalling audacity to no avail. This is so unfortunate because I used audacity for a long time with no problem, but recently reinstalled Windows & wiped out all my old programs.

[steve]

The first thing that I'd suggest is upgrading to Audacity 1.3.12 http://audacityteam.org/download/
Then go to this page and download "libmp3lame-win-3.98.2.zip" http://lame.buanzo.com.ar/

Extract the contents of that zip file into your Audacity program folder.
Then open Audacity and go to "Edit menu > Preferences > Libraries"
If Lame is not automatically detected, click on the "Locate" button in the "Lame" section and navigate to the Audacity program folder and Lame should now be recognised.

Please say if this solves the issue or not - in 99.9% of cases this will work, but if you're in 0.1% then there's a couple of other things we can do.

[donnybrook098]

thanks - for some reason Audacity doesn't recognize the lame file, and I don't want to download & install a bigger & better program just to fix something that worked the first time around. The problem must be on my end & I can't expect you to diagnose my problems, so thanks again

[steve]

Did you follow the steps in my last post?

If you did, then it's likely that you also have another version of Lame installed somewhere and it is confusing Audacity. We can probably fix that, but first I need to know if the previous steps failed, or if you tried something different to fix the problem.

[donnybrook098]

no, I did not follow your previous advice - you can close this case as I am giving up - thanks anyway. My hard drive is clean - I just formatted it & reinstalled Windows XP - there are no previous instances of lame on my machine - the problem is in Audacity & I don't want to mess with it - thanks again

[steve]

no, I did not follow your previous advice

Thanks for clarifying.