Audacity Forum

I got to bring up a fresh new Windows XP machine at work. No "baggage" from other applications and tons of drive space -- I think it was 1/2TB. Audacity install went well and I got the FFMpeg to work.

But not Lame.

I knew from other postings that I needed to pull down the ZIP file and use that, so I elbowed my way past the distractions and siren calls of other software and got the zip file. I unzipped and I got a mystery file, a dll and a text file with instructions, I believe, how to compile... something.

OK. Not working. I went back up and got the EXE file and installed that. I opened Audacity and tried to export an MP3 file. [Unable to find encoding library] (or words to that effect). [email protected]#%%^ By now I'm seriously running out of time so I shut the machine down and came back several hours later.

And everything worked.

Something magic happened in the restart that allowed Audacity to "find" the dll file. It had clearly failed earlier. I wonder how many Lame install failures could be avoided just by restarting the machine, or maybe restarting Audacity. And why Lame and not FFMpeg? FFMpeg worked straightaway.

Koz

The zip (with the instructions to rebuild it) is only really there because some people find it more likely to work than the dll that is in the installer. There are even some cases in reverse (the installer works but the zip doesn't).

It's true that lame_enc.dll in the zip is larger than the one in the exe. I doubt that's the reason by itself that it sometimes works when the one in the exe doesn't. Following the aforementioned instructions in the zip, I have never built the dll and got it to be as large as the one in the zip.

As far as I know the dll that always works (straight away) is the 3.97 one we host on the Forum (as it's 3.97 you have to give a health warning about using 192 kbps bit rate or higher, or you may get distortions).

The fact that computer restart made the dll work is interesting - I've often wondered whether the process is hanging/not waiting long enough rather than failing because of an incompatibility. Despite that, Dependency Walker shows a lot of potential problems with all the dlls - I think the LAME source code that builds lame_enc.dll might be building too many dependencies in that could cause the dll to fail on some machines.

The best hope is to try and get Leland involved. He built the dll in the zip. He is interested, but doesn't believe there are any easy fixes and he isn't really active in the project any longer.



Gale

Leland is working on lame_enc.dll detection issues now. I've attached a 3.98.4 version that he's built which he thinks may help. Please use/offer this one if there is a problem with the earlier .dll's.



Gale