HOWTO: Make MP3s With Audacity

Audacity is likely the most popular audio editor in use today. Part of that is because Audacity is free (as in beer AND speech) and the other part is because it’s damn good at what it does. I’ve used Audacity to record and create the OGG and MP3 files for every podcast I’ve ever done.

Given that it’s a free application, it’s not surprising that Audacity doesn’t support the encoding of MP3s natively. The MP3 file format is proprietary and therefore not very popular (although still widely used) in the community.

However, the authors of Audacity are nothing if not pragmatic and they made it easy for the end user to configure Audacity to encode MP3s using the third party LAME library. LAME is a recursive acronym for Lame Ain’t an MP3 Encoder. But I swear it is…

The name of the file you need is libmp3lame.so. I’ve uploaded a copy here in case it ever goes missing on the Internet (who knows what the future holds in the realm of digital audio?). I’d recommend trying this link first to ensure that you’re getting the latest version directly from the project. Download the file and save it somewhere permanent (like your Audacity directory is probably a good spot). Once you have it safely tucked away, go into the Audacity File -> Preferences -> File Formats -> Find Library button and tell Audacity where to find the file.

To create an MP3, simply selected File -> Export to MP3 from the File menu.

Enjoy!