Talk:FAQ:Installation and Plug-Ins

James: This is currently our most visited audacity manual page online with around 2,000,000 page views (see foot of page). Ideas for improving this page welcome. See Special:PopularPages for a breakdown of pages by popularity. Olivier: little update, 11,000,000 page views, still the most popular page (April 2012)

Peter 21Feb10: can I suggest that if and when this page is worked on that we split it into two The rationale being: this way we could ascertain which of the two is actually the most visited (I suspect LAME from my readings on the Forum)
 * 1) Installation of LAME and FFMPEG
 * 2) Installation of VST plug-ins
 * Sorry that I cannot volunteer for this rewrite as I use neither LAME nor VST plug-ins so have no user experience to work from.

Steve 6Nov11: Perhaps people also visit this page to see how to install/uninstall Audacty, so it may be better to have 4 sections:
 * Installing / Uninstalling Audacity.
 * Installing Lame.
 * Installing FFMPeg.
 * Installing Plug-Ins.

Steve 11April2012:

'''Re. Installing Lame and FFmpeg on Linux.'''


 * How much detail is needed?
 * Should the installation instructions only include installing for use with Audacity, or also include installing the headers/dev packages necessary for building Audacity with LAME/FFmpeg support?

For installing LAME and FFmpeg for use with Audacity (not including the dev packages) in Ubuntu 12.04, all that is needed is to add libmp3lame and libavformat53 using the Ubuntu Software Centre. This could simply be added in a couple of div notes:

From version 12.04 of Ubuntu the default package manager is the Ubuntu Software Centre. To install Lame using the Ubuntu Software Centre search for libmp3lame and install it.

From version 12.04 of Ubuntu the default package manager is the Ubuntu Software Centre. To install FFmpeg using the Ubuntu Software Centre search for libavformat53 and install it.

If the headers are also required (for building Audacity from the source code) then libmp3lame-dev and libavformat-dev are also required, but I would assume that people building from source would use apt (as per the building Audacity instructions on the wiki).

Gale Andrews wrote: "Can we solve this by generalising the steps instead of alienating users of slightly old Ubuntu?"
 * The difficulty that I'm finding with generalising is that there are so many possible variants:
 * Desktops: Gnome 2, Gnome 3, KDE, XFCE, Unity.
 * Package Managers: Synaptic, apt, aptitude, Software Centre.
 * Adding Repositories: Not required (Ubuntu 12.04), Software Sources (earlier Ubuntu/Mint/etc.), Multi-media key (Debian), ??? (Fedora/Suse)
 * When generalised to be inclusive of all options it boils down to:
 * Ensure that the necessary repositories are enabled.
 * Install the Lame and FFmpeg.
 * Install the development packages if required.
 * Would it perhaps be better to have a brief 1,2,3 and then link to specific examples on the wiki (for example, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Debian Squeeze, any others that we can manage)?