Audacity and MP3 support

Making Audacity work on Slackware 12.0 is an adventure. I'm using wxWidgets for some development myself, so building Audacity from sources shouldn't be a problem. I used Audacity 1.3.4. Now, onto the issues:

- Audacity 1.3.4 has a known bug that makes it's compiling fail. If you see this:

> import/ImportMP3.cpp: In function 'void
> GetMP3ImportPlugin(ImportPluginList*,
> UnusableImportPluginList*)':
> import/ImportMP3.cpp:52: error: 'DESC' was not
> declared in this scope
> import/ImportMP3.cpp:52: error: 'wxSIZEOF' was not
> declared in this scope
> make[1]: *** [import/ImportMP3.o] Error 1
> make[1]: Leaving directory
> `/home/milanb/install/audacity-src-1.3.4-beta/src'
> make: *** [audacity] Error 2

Use the following patch:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/files/audacity-1.3.4-nolibfailure.patch


Now, after I built everything, I started it only to realize that is has no MP3 support. It turns out MAD library is to be used for this, but although I have it installed the configure script doesn't detect it. It looks for libmad using pkg-config, but the vanilla libmad doesn't register itself with pkg-config. Cool, eh?

Apparently, Debian package for libmad adds this entry, but the patch hasn't made it into upstream (yet?). In the end, I blame Audacity developers for not using some other way to check for libmad - at least they should until pkg-config stuff is part of the official libmad release. But, maybe it's simply because they are using Ubuntu or Debian and they are completely unaware of the issue.

But, lets just get this working on the Slackware. Here's a nice patch for libmad 0.15.1 (currently the latest release) that adds the pkg-config stuff to libmad:

http://www.mars.org/mailman/public/mad-dev/2004-August/001066.html

So, just download the libmad source, patch it, build and install (before building I ran autoconf and automake, just in case) and Audacity's configure script will pick it up.

Enjoy the Audacity.