title: Audacity on RHEL/CentOS 5.2 link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/audacity-on-rhelcentos-52/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 453 created: 2008/10/01 07:09:00 created_gmt: 2008/10/01 07:09:00 comment_status: open post_name: audacity-on-rhelcentos-52 status: publish post_type: post

Audacity on RHEL/CentOS 5.2

Audacity is one of those nifty applications that always comes in handy when you’re trying to do any kind of multimedia production, even something simple like home video. It’s basically a tool for editing audio files, and a very good one at that.

There actually is an rpm package for audacity (audacity-1.3.0b-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm) on RHEL 5 from rpmforge (DAG), but it insists on an older version of wxGTK being installed than is current from the same repo (the latest from rpmforge is 2.8.8, while their audacity package wants 2.6). What’s odd is that the offending version doesn’t show up on DAG’s web site, but it is definitely in the yum repository.

So after googling around a little I found a relatively new repository called Planet CCRMA at home that stocks audio related rpms for Fedora and RHEL/CentOS.

Turns out that CCRMA’s build of audacity is a much newer version (audacity-1.3.5-0.5.beta.el5.ccrma.x86_64.rpm, actually downloaded from the planetccrma mirror after a little digging around — the individual pages for each package were incomplete, e.g. the audacity page only provided a link for the FC8 package), but when I went to install after having already loaded the usual prerequisite libraries, it still wanted soundtouch and jack-audio-connect. So I loaded these two from rpmforge, but still got an error on the version of soundtouch installed.

After thinking about this a little, I went up to CCRMA and replaced what I had with their version of soundtouch (soundtouch-1.3.1-6.el5.ccrma.x86_64.rpm). Once that was done, the CCRMA build of audacity loaded without a problem.

After installing, I successfully tested audacity with a couple of .mp3 and .ogg files I had lying around.

Although I really hate to install rpms from outside the 3 main repos I’ve used for years (CentOS, EPEL and rpmforge), in some cases like this, it can’t be avoided.

NOTE: The prereqs for audacity, according to a rpm -qRp of the rpm file (and my own rpm -q --whatprovides [component name] of the results), are:

wxGTK
aalib
soundlib
soundtouch
glibc
alsa-lib
expat
libid3tag
jack-audio-connect
libmad
libogg
libsamplerate
libsndfile
libstdc++
libvorbis

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