I finally got around to adding Audacity to my BLFS system. For people who don't know already, I just wanted say that it was easy to do. Audacity was the last thing that I was going (pendrive in hand) to my wife's Windows computer to use. I think everybody knows what Audacity is and does. I only wanted to talk about installing it in a BLFS system.

Audacity is not currently in the BLFS book, but I think it should be. I imagine most any BLFS system with other typical GUI apps in the BLFS book will have many of the dependencies installed already. Go to the Audacity wiki for more on dependencies and links to download them. Here is what I had to build and install...

WxGTK-2.8.12 (not in BLFS)
libsndfile-1.0.23 (in the current BLFS book)
libsamplerate-0.1.8 (in the current BLFS book)
twolame-0.3.13 (not in BLFS)
libsbsms-2.0.1 (not in BLFS)
soundtouch-1.6.0 (not in BLFS)
audacity-minsrc-2.0.1 (not in BLFS)

That standard Audacity source file listed there has local versions of many things it needs and that might be missing from the system. I already had most of that stuff installed. In all cases but one, the config file for audacity found the system files and used them without me having to specify "system" for them in the configure command. That one exception was libsamplerate. If that one was not mentioned in the configure command, the local version of libresample was used. And libresample may be okay, but I had already installed libsamplerate. That is one example of a one-or-the-other dependency with audacity.

For pitch and tempo changes, you can install both soundtouch and sbsms. They are not one-or-the-other. The regular "Change Pitch" and "Change Tempo" menu options in the "Effects" drop down menu are provided by soundtouch. The "Sliding Scale Time/Pitch Shift" option is added there by sbsms and is supposed to give finer control.

The only issue for which I had to turn to Google was regarding libsbsms. The build stopped with errors...
I got rid of that problem by editing /src/buffer.h in the source and adding these lines...
For all of the packages that I installed, I first browsed ./configure --help for the options and defaults for things like shared libraries and so on. For audacity itself, the following worked okay for me, appropriately installing system and local things...
As root...
Anyway, that's how it went. I recommend it.

Hi stoat,

Nice thread!

2 minor things you might want to include/change:

- Include the links to the used package versions, which would make getting them a bit easier.
- Remove the explicit use of sudo and change that to: As root. Not everybody uses sudo.

I added those tweaks to it. Thanks.

In the last few days or so, Audacity has advanced to v2.0.2. But I'm not interested in that at the moment. I doubt anything related to installation has been affected.

I'm nearly done building a new BLFS system with new versions of many applications. One in particular that I upgraded was ffmpeg (to v0.11.1). Well, neither audacity-2.0.1 nor audacity-2.0.2 will build with the latest versions of ffmpeg. It's a known issue (except by me, that is). And from what I can tell, a fix by Audacity devs is not exactly coming in a hurry.

http://bugzilla.audacityteam.org/show_bug.cgi?id=540
http://audacity.238276.n2.nabble.com...td7556204.html

I tried the patches in that second link, and David Timms is right, they're "not really ready for consumption" (they didn't help me any). I ended up compiling Audacity by using the --without-ffmpeg configure option. Honestly, I don't really know how that is going to impact what I use Audacity for (mostly time-compressing or time-stretching audio demuxed from video to correct a progressive AV sync problem in the video).

Just FYI.

Another update to report two more things about this Audacity and ffmpeg business...

One thing is that David Timms is continuing to work on patches to fix the problems in compiling Audacity with new versions of ffmpeg (e.g., ffmpeg-0.11.1 which is the current version in BLFS). He now has a bunch of patches, one for each issue he has worked on. He says he may roll them into one patch in the end. I may try that when it's ready, but here is the other thing I have discovered...

I have been able to work with Audacity just fine after compiling it with the --without-ffmpeg configure option. Audacity uses ffmpeg for import/export support of many audio file formats. But Audacity has built-in support for some file formats and can work without being compiled against ffmpeg. I've been able to import, tinker with, and export mp2 and mp3 audio file formats, and that's all I need it for at the moment. Other people may need something else that ffmpeg can give Audacity, but I'm doing okay with it as is.