Audacity problem - export to MP3

imuneekru · Post by **imuneekru** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 3:35 pm

I'm having a problem with that nasty little Mac freeware program called Audacity. I wish to use it to encode a *.aiff file to a smaller MP3 so that I can get all my recorded dialogue lines into iMovie without any crashes or hiccups.

When I try to export to MP3, Audacity comes up with an error saying that "Audacity does not export mp3 directly, but relies on LAME, an exporting library available separately. Would you like to locate LAMElib now?"

Has anyone with a mac run into this, and if so do you know what the heck LAME is and how to get it? Also, any advice on cramming iMovie full of sound effects without overloading it would be appreciate.

Lyrs · Post by **Lyrs** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 10:45 pm

lame is a codec (compression-decompression) algorithm used to format and read mp3s.

Willen · Post by **Willen** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 11:36 pm

LAME for Mac: http://homepage.mac.com/awk/lame/

Willen · Post by **Willen** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 11:49 pm

Oh, and Audacity is a pretty good program, give it a chance.

Also, I'm not sure if MP3s in iMovie will have the same problems as MP3s in Windows video editing programs. AIFF might be recommended over MP3 since AIFF is uncompressed and the less compression, the better. An alternative would be AIFF-C (compressed, but less than MP3) or ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec), but personally I avoid using compressed audio when editing.

broken_dreams101 · Post by **broken_dreams101** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 5:41 pm

audacity, lol. i didnt know anyone but I used that. Great program, i use it all the time to get songs with the 'what you hear' button. but i use it for windows, dunno if its the same with mac.

downwithpants · Post by **downwithpants** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 10:32 pm

broken_dreams101 wrote:audacity, lol. i didnt know anyone but I used that. Great program, i use it all the time to get songs with the 'what you hear' button. but i use it for windows, dunno if its the same with mac.

hmm this must be a different audacity. the one being referred to in this topic is http://audacity.sourceforge.net

broken_dreams101 · Post by **broken_dreams101** » Sat Sep 16, 2006 12:49 pm

downwithpants wrote:
broken_dreams101 wrote:audacity, lol. i didnt know anyone but I used that. Great program, i use it all the time to get songs with the 'what you hear' button. but i use it for windows, dunno if its the same with mac.
hmm this must be a different audacity. the one being referred to in this topic is http://audacity.sourceforge.net

same one. But i prolly have a earlier version because i initially got it to work in unison with miles sound tool to extract and edit KOTOR sound files. worked pretty well too until i had to reformat my comp then miles had some bugs with converting the music and voice files to WMV format and thats when i started using the what you hear button.