14.04: Audacity does not work with FFMpeg anymore

**Yellow Pasque** · April 26th, 2014

Originally Posted by robi-hipnos

Andrew, we mostly use FFMpeg to import audio files sent to us from different sources. Most of them are in AAC (video sources), WMA (dictation devices) and some recordings made on mobile phones which I think is AMR. After editing in Audacity, we export them to MP3 and OGG.

Yeah, if that's the case, then you're already doing lossy->lossy conversion and I agree that you should just convert the file to desired format before importing into Audacity.

**ricardisimo** · April 28th, 2014

Compiled from source, but no luck. Still getting the same error: "Audacity cannot open this type of file", a file which I can open just fine with Audacity on my Windows box, as well as on my other Ubuntu machine still running 13.10.

**andrew.46** · April 28th, 2014

Originally Posted by ricardisimo

Compiled from source, but no luck. Still getting the same error: "Audacity cannot open this type of file", a file which I can open just fine with Audacity on my Windows box, as well as on my other Ubuntu machine still running 13.10.

You followed my guide?

**Maarten Baert** · April 30th, 2014

For those that are having trouble compiling their own Audacity/ffmpeg/libav, I've put together a tarball with the required binary and libraries. You can get it like this (64-bit only at the moment):

sudo apt-get install audacity libavformat-extra-54 libavcodec-extra-54 libavutil-extra-52
wget http://andere.maartenbaert.be/audacity-static.tar.gz
tar -xzf audacity-static.tar.gz
cd audacity-static
./check-libs
./run-audacity

This tarball doesn't include all libraries and files, just the ones that are missing on Ubuntu. That's why you have to install audacity and libav first. Other than that, these commands don't modify your system, all extra libraries stay in the folder 'audacity-static', so you don't have to worry about breaking something.

If someone needs a 32-bit version, I can create that as well. The binary/libraries were copied from Arch Linux which solved this problem long ago by packaging an older version of ffmpeg as a separate package (just for Audacity).