Hope for Audacity

I decided to get back into my hobby/task of digitizing the various vinyl albums I have in my music collection. After first verifying that my hardware and cabling setup was correct (it wasn't; I had the sound out from my receiver plugged into the microphone input on the sound card instead of audio in), I went to fire up audacity to capture and edit my digitized music and it wasn't there.

The obvious solution to the case of the missing audacity was to install audacity using yum. This got me a bunch of failed dependency messages which is always a bad sign. The problem was that the correct version of another package called wxGTK wasn't available. I Googled and found an old (last year) thread discussing the problem on the CentOS mailing list with the upshot being that there didn't seem to be an agreed upon solution. It seems that the current version wxGTK for CentOS and RHEL 5 is 2.8 while the most recent version of audacity wants version 2.6 of wxGTK.

My first thought was to just use a different capture and edit tool. I could always use arecord from the ALSA package to do the capture. I found a list of Linux audio packages on Wikipedia and proceeded to work my way down the list looking for one that had been built as a RHEL/CentOS 5 rpm. While some packages such as sweep appeared promising, all seemed to have their problems (e.g., sweep crashed with a click in the wrong place on a regular basis).

It's possible that there is a working version of one or more of these packages in a repo I don't have configured. Unfortunately, adding repos is not something to be taken lightly since there are conflicts between some repos.

I Googled some more and found another thread discussing the problem on the HowToForge forums. The last response here suggested just creating the appropriate symbolic links that would essentially alias the 2.8 wxGTK library files to the required 2.6 versions. After creating scads of symbolic links and installing audacity with --nodeps my reward was a set of run-time errors from audacity complaining that the detected version of the wxGTK libraries with not 2.6.

Since nothing was dependent on wxGTK or audacity, I decided to see if I could get an earlier version of wxGTK to install. This turned out to be surprisingly easy since rpmfind had the 2.6.3 version. This installed cleanly after I removed the 2.8 version of wxGTK.

This solution has also been posted to the HowToForge forum mentioned above.

Minor update as of 24 November 2008: I am happily back to digitizing my collection of vinyl LPs using audacity.

Cheers,
Dave