Installing Audacity on the Eee PC

Posted at Thursday, November 01, 2007

My primary plan for my Eee PC is to use it a mobile blogging tool. But I just had to see if I could install some audio editing software. It turns out the answer is yes. Yes I could.

Color me a little bit shocked that I managed to do this on my first day with my new toy. I had kind of sworn to myself that I wouldn't install any new software until I had played with everything the Eee PC had to offer out of the box. But where's the fun in that?

When you first power up the Eee PC, there are about 40 programs installed. One is a sound recorder, but that won't get you very far if you're editing podcasts or radio stories. Ardour might be pushing it a bit, so I figured I would try to install Audacity. There's a simple add/remove programs dialog included, but right now there are only a handful of programs that you can download and most of them are actually just updated versions of the applications that ship with the Eee PC.

Continue reading Installing Audacity on the Eee PC at Eee Site.

 

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11 Comments:

  1. Mike Cane said...
    November 1, 2007 6:39 PM  
    OMG.

    1) I use Audacity on my desktop

    2) I didn't know there was a Linux version

    3) It can run on the Eee!

    OMG x 2!

    Thanks!!
    a magical trumpet called bill said...
    November 3, 2007 10:00 AM  
    pretty cool that the eee pc uses apt! that means with minimal tweaking you have several thousand programs that are installable in seconds.

    It also means that the eee probably automatically installs updates via apt-get upgrade, which is very good.
    Benjamin said...
    November 9, 2007 2:27 PM  
    I second Mike's emotion! I've been watching the Eee for the past week or so to do some simple audio editing during my commute. To my amazement there is a blog where someone (namely Brad Linder, yay!) has installed Audacity and it wasn't a huge pain. I too thought about Ardour and had the same reservations. I was curious about one thing, how much usable hard drive space do you have after installing a couple apps? Obviously the bigger the app the more space eaten up, but do you still have around a gig left? More?
    Thanks!
    Brad Linder said...
    November 9, 2007 2:36 PM  
    Benjamin: You have about 1.3 GB of free space before you start installing programs. I've tried to keep things to a minimum by just installing Audacity, GIMP, and I keep wavering back and forth about whether I want to install Opera or not. Loading the Full Desktop also takes up a bit of space. Right now I still have about 1GB of free space on my unit, plus I keep a 1GB memory card in the SD slot. If I wind up doing a lot of audio editing on the go I'll probably get a larger storage card.

    Also, I figured out a kind of convoluted way to install Audacity 1.3 beta:

    http://www.bradlinder.net/2007/11/how-to-run-audacity-13-beta-on-eee-pc.html

    As for Ardour, I haven't even tried installing it. I'm sure you could get it to run, but it just doesn't seem like it'd be worth the effort.
    Benjamin said...
    November 9, 2007 3:13 PM  
    Brad, thanks for getting back to me so fast! I know comments are not an ideal method for back and forth communication, but I wanted to let you know that I've spent more time on your newer Eee posts and they have been tremendously helpful. It's exciting that so many audio options (software and hardware) are available on the Eee PC as well as other linux options. Got to go now and order my Eee PC!
    consuelo said...
    November 27, 2007 8:26 AM  
    how do you install LAME mp3 converter?
    Brad Linder said...
    November 27, 2007 9:39 AM  
    Consuelo:

    I didn't bother installing LAME, since I usually work with WAV files, and if I need to compress an audio file I'm fine with OGG. But here are the instructions for installing LAME:

    http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Lame_Installation#Linux.2FUnix_instructions
    Anonymous said...
    January 16, 2008 11:30 AM  
    How do you find the quality, recording directly using the Eee's on-board audio chipset?

    I've read (here? elsewhere?) that there is surprisingly little line noise compared to what one usually encounters with built-in audio.

    It seems that the Intel HDA spec supports high bitrate playback, but I haven't come across information about the supported recording rates.

    I'm asking because I'm considering an Eee-based recording setup for music, with audio input to the Eee from a mixing board.

    What are your thoughts?
    Brad Linder said...
    January 16, 2008 11:33 AM  
    I've sort of avoided finding an answer to this question because I have a USB mixer in my home studio and my field audio recorders record straight to flash memory, so I'm pretty much always transferring or recording digital audio to the Eee PC for editing without relying on the analog line and mic inputs.
    daniel said...
    April 21, 2008 12:42 AM  
    let all be fine and well,

    thanks for the great work,I have two questions.

    1). can you install this on gos the same way?

    2). windows audacity requires you to download a file called lame.dll to export to mp3, what do I do about this with linux?
    Brad Linder said...
    April 21, 2008 7:37 AM  
    Daniel: You can follow the instructions here to install Audacity and LAME under Ubuntu:

    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=438499

    gOS is just a modified version of Ubuntu, so the same steps should work.

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