Audacity 1.3 beta testing

Here follows a number of tips for getting the Audacity 1.3.x beta branch to work on Linux. NOTE: This is currently only tested in Ubuntu Dapper.

General information
When beta-testing, it is important to have the latest version of Audacity and PortAudio, else some bugs that occur in the version you use may be already corrected.

To obtain the latest CVS version of Audacity, one needs some sort of CVS client. After obtaining that, one can check out the latest development version using the command:

$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@audacity.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/audacity checkout audacity

To test with the latest version of the PortAudio v19-dev library, do a:

$ wget http://www.portaudio.com/archives/pa_snapshot_v19.tar.gz

and replace the contents of audacity/lib-src/portaudio-v19/ with the contents of that archive.

Post your experiences with Audacity and PortAudio here: Audacity_PortAudio_v19

ALSA / OSS
To enable ALSA-support, Audacity must be compiled with:

$ ./configure --with-portaudio=v19 --without-portmixer $ make $ sudo make install

Portaudio version 19
To enable ALSA-support when compiling PortAudio, ALSA development libraries must be installed on the computer. To try whether this is present, do:

$ locate asoundlib.h

If it produces nothing, then the library probably is not present.

Else, one can do a:

$ cd [src]/audacity/lib-src/portaudio-v19/ $ ./configure | grep "checking for snd_pcm_open in -lasound..." checking for snd_pcm_open in -lasound...[yes|no]

If it says yes, then ALSA support will be present if you compile Audacity.

Portaudio has a debug option: --enable-debug-output that is a good info to include when looking for help.

To check whether there are a number of ALSA-devices ready to be used, there exists a number of useful utilities in the portaudio-v19/bin directory, for example pa_devs that lists all the devices that PortAudio may use:

$ [src]/audacity/lib-src/portaudio-v19/bin/pa_devs

Unicode
Both wxGTK and Audacity should be compiled with "--enable-unicode" to display properly in GTK2 environments.

example for wxGTK:

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/wxGTK --enable-unicode $ make $ sudo make install

example for Audacity:

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/audacity-1.3.0b --without-portmixer --with-portaudio=v19 --enable-unicode $ make $ make install

Libraries
the "with-xxx=local" searches (as you probably know) the lib-src/ directory in the Audacity source tree for libraries to compile into Audacity.

This means that you, for example, can download the newest vorbis library, put it in [audacity-src-dir]/lib-src/libvorbis and compile Audacity with "--with-vorbis=local":

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/audacity-1.3.0b --without-portmixer --with-portaudio=v19 --with-vorbis=local --enable-unicode $ make $ sudo make install

For a full list of compile time options, issue the command:

$ ./configure --help

in the audacity source directory.