6

Audacity builds on Ubuntu no longer support FFMpeg because of the libav foolishness.

Is there maybe a PPA or something with a build of Audacity that supports using a local build of FFMpeg? I could compile it myself, but it would be a set back in terms of being time consuming, especially if there are errors.

P.S.

Please do not suggest the nightly PPA, it doesn't support FFMpeg.

Improve this question
1
  • I'm honestly considering switching over to Manjaro or SUSE because of this -- Audacity is one of my main tools and it's completely useless in 14.04. IF the Ubuntu team could at least compile it against libavcodec to restore BASIC FUNCTIONALITY, this wouldn't be an issue...
    – user271351
    Apr 20, 2014 at 8:15

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
7

Looks like Audacity will actually build against ffmpeg-0.10.12. I have written it all up here:

Audacity under Trusty Tahr: Building it with FFmpeg http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2219907

Test it out and let me know if it all works out...

Improve this answer
4
  • I ran across that post also! It worked flawlessly for me
    – P05TMAN
    Apr 29, 2014 at 19:36
  • I will still make a few more changes to this guide but it certainly works as it is. Could you leave a post on the thread attached to the guide mentioning that it worked well for you? Thanks :)
    – andrew.46 ♦
    Apr 29, 2014 at 21:08
  • Sure thing, Andrew!
    – P05TMAN
    May 5, 2014 at 20:24
  • @Lexible This answer was useful in its time but that time was 6 years ago :)
    – andrew.46 ♦
    May 29, 2020 at 8:10
6

From the Audacity manual we can read that it will not build against FFmpeg libraries newer than 0.8:

Audacity should support building against FFmpeg 0.5 through 0.8. It may not currently be possible to build Audacity against later versions of FFmpeg.Audacity Manual

From 14.04 we will have installed libavcodec54 by default. This will conflict with older libavcodec releases. Audacity is already compiled and built against libavcodec and LAME:

Some Linux distributions (for example, Ubuntu) now package Audacity with MP3 encoding and FFmpeg support already linked dynamically to the relevant system libraries. In these packaged builds there is no need to locate LAME or FFmpeg, so Audacity will have no "Libraries" Preferences.Audacity Manual

As it appears to be possible to still compile Audacity with newer FFmpeg releases for file format conversions not natively supported by Audacity.

If we only need to export to a non supported file format it may be easier to just use Audacity's option to export using an external application. This unfortunatley is not implemented for file import.

On the export file format dialog we can choose (external program) instead of an inbuilt format. On Options... we can then define a pipe to any external converter including avconv which had replaced FFmpeg.

avconv -i - "%f"

The output format will then be determined by the file extension given.

enter image description here

Improve this answer
2
  • 2
    This is rather frustrating though. I can't import even simply mp4 files to audacity, and that can get into the way of real work. When you have to convert a video recording to mp3 for editing... it's frustrating having to open another application, do the conversion, then open in audacity, then edit, then export again...
    – RolandiXor
    Mar 10, 2014 at 6:33
  • @RolandiXor You can always use ffmpeg (the real one, not the fake one) to stream copy the audio: ffmpeg -i input -codec:a copy -map 0:a output or re-encode it ffmpeg -i input output.wav.
    – llogan
    Mar 10, 2014 at 18:58
2

I installed Audacity from their daily builds and aac/mp4 import works flawlessly for me now. https://launchpad.net/~audacity-team/+archive/daily

Please check and report.

Improve this answer
1
  • @grn-I saw your comment on the website and it installed with no errors but I don't know what the name of the program is to install
    – BJsgoodlife
    Jul 13, 2015 at 14:52

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .