Etch from scratch - LAME

Who would have thought that in choosing “Export As MP3″ from the File menu in Audacity would have instigated such a lot of learning.

In the last two hours I have learnt about another Debian repository to add to my sources.list, authenticating a public key, downloading and compiling a file from source, and some of the history of MP3s and related patents.

Installing Audacity was easy:

apt-get install audacity

I assumed that the creation of MP3s within Audacity was available as the item was available on the File menu, i.e. it was not greyed out or dim.

When I chose “Export As MP3″, I was prompted to provide a filename, then a message was displayed to say that I needed libmp3lame.so. I was then prompted as to whether I wanted to go looking for it in /usr/lib.

I had a scrat around /usr/lib and /usr/local/lib and did not find libmp3lame.so. I went back to the Audacity web site as I remember reading that LAME (Lame Ain’t an MP3 Encoder) would need to be downloaded and installed after Audacity. What I had read referred to the Windows version, but I thought perhaps I would have a go at installing a deb package perhaps called lame.

apt-get install lame

Did not find anything in my apt-get cache. Then I remembered Christian Marillat’s site www.debian-multimedia.org.

I added an appropriate repository from the www.debian-multimedia.org web site to my sources.list file, then:

apt-get update

Then the fun began to figure out what to do with the following error:

W: GPG error: http://mirror.home-dn.net stable Release: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 07DC563 D1F41B907
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

So off I went back to the www.debian-multimedia.org web site to find the public key. I didn’t scroll right to the bottom of the home page, or look at the FAQ. Remembering that it was Marillat’s site, I decided to ignore the displayed error.

apt-get install lame

The following error was displayed:

WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!
lame
Install these packages without verification [y/N]? N
E: Some packages could not be authenticated

Back to www.debian-multimedia.org web site to find that the public key was at the bottom of the home page, and one of two FAQs

I downloaded the public key and then used

dpkg -i debian-multimedia-keyring_2007.02.14_all.deb

to install the public key.

Re-entered:

apt-get update

and

apt-get install lame

This installed lots of documentation, none of which assisted me to locate what I needed. Unlike, the Windows version, where you simply downloaded a .dll file and showed Audacity where it was.

Googling showed me that I ‘needed’ to download a file from SourceForge and compile from source. Sigh.

Download latest source file from The LAME Project. In my case it was lame-3.97.tar.gz.

Unpack or uncompress using:

tar -xvzf lame-3.97.tar.gz

Navigate to the lame-3.97 directory.

Read the README and INSTALL files. Decide together with H, that most of the configure file consisted of the ’standard’ configure file stuff. Ran:

./configure

I didn’t have the necessary build tools on my computer as I only installed Etch some weeks ago, and I still haven’t got round to installing what people consider ‘essentials’.

apt-get install build-essential

got the necessary tools, or should I say ‘essential’. Re-entered:

./configure

then:

make

Become the root user, then entered:

make install

Checked that I had libmp3lame.so in the /usr/local/lib directory.

Ran Audacity and attempted to ‘Export As MP3′ again. It worked!

Now I just have to watch out for dependency hell, as LAME was not installed using the apt-get package manager.