Audacity Forum

Now it seems that the problem is solved. A friend at the Swedish Ubuntu forum (actually the same person, who complied Audacity 1.3.8 and provided it at his own repository), made a recompilation of Audacity 1.3.8 as well as ffmpeg. So the issue can be seen as solved, at least at the moment...

With 1.3.9 it seems the problem is back. I compiled both a static and a shared version of ffmpeg from SVN and point Audacity at the resulting libavcodec.so, and it fails to recognize it. I'm on Ubuntu Jaunty 64 and got Audacity 1.3.9 from GetDeb.

Does anyone know of a repo or ppa with good versions of Audacity 1.3.9 and a working libavcodec?

Thanks.

Hello, ArtInvent!

You could try the repository from where I got a now working Audacity + ffmpeg. The location is found at https://launchpad.net/~philip5 There you will find the address to Philip's repo as well as the security key. And despite that Philip is a swede, the pages are in English. Audacity and Ffmpeg are found under "extra". This is the same repository as which I mentioned in a previous post above.

Per

Per, thanks, this is the repo I've been looking for. Installed both ffmpeg and associated along with audacity from this ppa, and Audacity auto located the ffmpeg libs when I opened Preferences | Libraries | Locate. Awesome. The ppa does not seem to say if it has 32 bit only or 64 bit packages, I'm on 64 bit and it works fine so perhaps it is indeed both. Also has a lot of other good and up to date multimedia and driver packages. Very nice.

perab wrote:Hello, ArtInvent!

You could try the repository from where I got a now working Audacity + ffmpeg. The location is found at https://launchpad.net/~philip5 There you will find the address to Philip's repo as well as the security key. And despite that Philip is a swede, the pages are in English. Audacity and Ffmpeg are found under "extra". This is the same repository as which I mentioned in a previous post above.

Per

Hi,

I am having the same problem on Ubuntu x86_64. After the recent kernel update I get this message when I try to export an audio file in Audacity to ac3:

Properly configured FFmpeg is required to proceed.
You can configure it at Preferences > Libraries.

Once there it is asking me to locate "libavformat.so.52", I locate it, choose it but it still gives me the same error. Everything worked perfectly before the update. I re-installed FFmpeg and other codecs but to no avail, help is greatly appreciated!

Are you using Audacity and FFmpeg installed from the Ubuntu repositories (installed with Synaptic/apt/Add Programs) or have you built either of them from their source code?

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the reply. I have the packages from the Ubuntu repositories.

My guess is that Ubuntu has not patched their build of Audacity to work with their current build of FFmpeg.
You could report this as a bug to Ubuntu (check first that they do not already have it listed as a bug), and/or build a compatible version of FFmpeg and/or Audacity from the source code.

Which version of Ubuntu are you using? (if it's earlier than 10.04 then the problem may already be fixed).
I'm just upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 myself, so I'll have more information about this question in 10.04 soon.

Steven,

I'm on Ubuntu 10.04. I'm very much in need of ac3 export, at the moment we are using Audacity on a mac osx to do the job. I really don't know where to look further to track down the problem on our linux station.

Do you recommend compiling Audacity and FFmpeg from source or do you have any other suggestions? Thanks in advance!

Compiling FFmpeg or compiling Audacity should do the trick, but until I try it I'm not sure which version you should use.
I think what you need to do is either compile an earlier version of FFmpeg, or build Audacity with the changes outlined here: http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... tallffmpeg
I'll be able to provide more detail when I've tried this myself.

Alternatively, for now you could export a WAV and then use VLC to convert from WAV to AC3.
If you use VLC, in the "Encapsulation Method" you will probably want to select "RAW", then go to the Audio Codec tab and select "A52/AC-3"