Today I had a need to edit some audio. I googled around and found audacity, found too wxX11 which it needs to run. I downloaded both, compiled them, and fired up audacity. I did not have any error messages during compile time, or configure time for that matter. Everthing went smoothly... until I started up audacity.

I got the first time use dialog and went through setting it up, point and click style. At some point during this there was an option to find my mp3 encoder. I planned on exporting everything to oggs but decided to find it anyway, why not? I clicked the button to find the encoder and my system froze. It froze, my slackware box froze. I was shocked. On my root window I have a transparent terminal that always displays top. My CPU was at 100% all my RAM was used and my swap was filled to the brim (a whole 2 gigs!). It would have been only slightly less informative had top just displayed *donkey punch* I couldn't crash out of my gui, three finger salute didn't soft reset, nothing. 12:15. Press Restart.

I was going to give audacity the benefit of the doubt though. I restarted my machine and tried it again, choosing not to select and mp3 encoder this time. I found that the scroll bar at the bottom is a mere window decoration. It does nothing. "Okay, so what? I can use the scroll function." Then I found that when I played the audio I was working on, it does not scroll, a new window opens so I can see the next section of audio. "Oh, now that just sucks." I tried to use the help files but can't. Hotkeys are never disabled, so if I need to type a word that uses the letter p I can't. My audio will start to play. Same goes for saving files. I've checked out their online help files, and their wiki. Nothing. Sometimes just random buttons are selected. My hand isn't anywhere near an input device. "Huh, now why did that drop down menu drop down?"

And it crashes. My god does it crash.

I've heard lots of people recommend audacity, so its poor performance must have been my fault. Why else would anyone recommend such a buggy piece of junk? Has anyone else had this much trouble, and if so how did you fix it? I'm pretty sure I didn't miss the --work_properly configure option. I am using the current audacity and wxX11-0.4.2.

I'll also take recommendations on different software, I hold no allegiance to audacity.

Audacity is crap, it's true. Rezound http://rezound.sourceforge.net/ is the business. In my opinion Rezound is wonderfull. Like Audacity it has a list of dependencies. It wants Fox http://www.fox-toolkit.com/ and JACK http://jackit.sourceforge.net/ JACK wants libsndfile http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/#Download
It's worth it.

Edit - oh. I forgot fftw-2.1.5 http://www.fftw.org/download.html

When I try to install the dependencies for rezound I get stuck on the Fox toolkit. In the 1.2.3 build I get
and in the fox-1.0.52 build I get
I found this posting, when looking about trying to troubleshoot, http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/li.../msg00002.html . I chuckled at first, and then realized that it wasn't as funny as I initially thought, the guy that's coding the software I want to use had troubles with the library too and no one seemed to have an answer.

Okay, it's still a little funny.

I could learn how to apply the kludge he proposed in his initial thread (which would be a bit of a pain), but I'm hoping, Andrew, that since you have obviously been using Rezound you too had this problem and have a work-around.

Well my workaround may not work for you. I got the second error because I don't have Mesa installed. I have an Nvidia graphics card and the Nvidia installer provides Open GL hardware acceleration for 3D graphics, that's why I didn't install Mesa. For me the solution was to run ./configure and then edit the Makefile in fox-1.0.51/src and twice remove the word Mesa to change line 73 from

GL_LIBS = -lMesaGL -lMesaGLU

to

GL_LIBS = -lGL -lGLU

But with fox-1.2.3 there was no need as the configure script was inteligent enough to see the difference between Open GL and Mesa and it built without a problem. You should be able to avoid this problem entirely if you configure fox-1.2.3 with ./configure --with-opengl=no . Hopefully that won't cause any problems for Rezound.

Quick question for goofyheadedpunk, have you tried to install an audacity slackware package instead?

Yes, I have tried to install it from a slackware package. Sorry, I forgot to mention that.

I couldn't figure out a workaround, so I just installed Mesa. Problem fixed.

New problems. After Mesa I compiled installed fftw-2.1.5, jack-0.98.1, and fox-1.2.3. I got no errors during either configure or compile times. I then make installed them and started the rezound configure. All three of the above libraries could not be found.

I know that the Mesa documentation had me copy the headers and the libraries into other directories, but none of the others had me do that. (Unless, of course, I just missed it.) So there's something I don't understand about installing new libraries that I should. Can anyone point me to HOWTOs, or explain what I'm not doing that I should be?

I did get the rezound binary, and liked what I saw. It worked pretty nicely, except that the audio played a bit slowly, and skipped a little. I was hoping that compiling my own would fix these slight performance issues. Besides, it almost feels wrong to use someone else's binary. I don't know, maybe it's just me.

Sorry you're have such trouble with Audacity. But just as a data point, I'm having great luck with it (so far) on my Fedora Core 1 system. See my post "Audio Heaven ....."

Good luck,
utah

If you installed things in /usr/local (this is the default if you just run ./configure without --prefix=/someplace) you'll need to set

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

if you didn't do this before you installed JACK it won't have found libsndfile, this is probably why you're having problems with sound. If you close the terminal/konsole it will forget so you'll need to reset PKG_CONFIG_PATH every time you open the terminal. As for Fox, it seems Rezound won't build against Fox-1.2.3 (I've just tried) in the past I've always used Fox-1.0.52 so why not try that? http://www.fox-toolkit.com/download.html
Try building it without open-gl
./configure --with-opengl=no
I'm sorry you're having such trouble. I hope it all works out in the end.

I now have a functioning Rezound. The audio is still slightly under tempo, but just slightly. I'm a percussionist, so I can feel that it's under tempo. It doesn't really matter though, I'll probably only use rezound every 8 months or so and it doesn't hinder me in any way.

I did end up configuring rezound with fox-1.0.52 without opengl. During configure it didn't find fftw, which I still don't understand. I added the locations of my new libraries to ld.so.conf, but to no avail.

Thanks for all the help.