Audacity Forum

I successfully recorded music from a vinyl record. I then successfully downloaded and installed the Lame dll (no thanks to a bunch of arcane, illogical user interfaces). I was even able to export a selection as an MP3. The first one prompted me to enter the Track, Artist, and Album. The second one didn't ask for this information (strange, but not a biggie). After exporting and saving all the tracks on the album as MP3s, I tried playing them: no sound whatsoever. I tried three different players Microsoft, Real, and I-Tunes.

I am just an old guy trying to preserve my music. I also do human factors consulting and try to teach software geeks how to make things easy for people who don't want to become a software engineer to use their software. All you have to do is ask the question "What does the user want to do?" Then design a single button to do that. Hide the layers of complexity and make them seek it.

joetherob wrote:(no thanks to a bunch of arcane, illogical user interfaces)

Yes, a lot of folk have that problem thanks to Microsoft's arcane, illogical and ineffective security policy in Internet Explorer. For other web browsers it's just a matter of Left Click on the download link and it downloads the Lame installation file.

joetherob wrote:I was even able to export a selection as an MP3. The first one prompted me to enter the Track, Artist, and Album. The second one didn't ask for this information (strange, but not a biggie).

Can you give a step-by-step account of what you did so that we can (hopefully) see where it went wrong.
(There's a tutorial here with a section about Exporting MP3s http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... h_your_MP3 )

joetherob wrote:I tried playing them: no sound whatsoever. I tried three different players Microsoft, Real, and I-Tunes.

Have you tried Importing them back into Audacity to see if they will play?

joetherob wrote:I am just an old guy trying to preserve my music

Is the final destination of your music an iPod, or CD, or is it staying on your computer? For CD, you would be better to Export as WAV files.

joetherob wrote:All you have to do is ask the question "What does the user want to do?" Then design a single button to do that.

Audacity is a highly versatile multi-track audio editing and production application. It enables people to transfer vinyl to CD, edit music, produce multi-track recordings, audio restoration, make PodCasts, Record Radio shows, edit samples for samplers, record sermons, edit field recordings, analyse speech or other audio, create sound effects and a host of other applications.

Because Audacity is Open Source, anyone may adapt it to suit their needs. One example is the CleanSpeech mode which provides a simplified interface for some standard adjustments typically made on speech recordings. The license terms of Audacity allow people to produce other versions for specific applications.

There is a commercial product called Audiotouch based on Audacity that "has been designed to make recording and playback of audio easy to understand and use. It features a unique one-touch recording / saving feature, so you can quickly record multiple audio files directly to disk, without the need to interact with any save dialog boxes."
Audiotouch is a commercial product based on Audacity - a 14 day trial version is available from their web-site: http://audiotouch.com.au/
[Edit] The 1.2.6 version of Audiotouch is freeware - also available from the same web-site