Grrr. The Audacity binaries keep crashing on Mac OS 10.4.7 on my Intel-based Mac Mini. This is true for both 1.2.4 and 1.3.0b. I think I have a working Audacity binary on my laptop with Mac OS 10.3.9 – but I’ve moving all my music stuff off the laptop.
I’ve tried to get Ardour to work, thinking it would be an interesting Audacity alternative. Not so. Ardour is leagues beyond what I will ever need, I think. All I ever do with these programs is cropping soundfiles, so Audacity is already super-charged with features. With Ardour, I was unable to figure out how to import an MP3 file into the system.
Maybe I should try to build Audacity from source. I got wxWidgets 2.6 for the Mac. Compiling and installing was painless. Only later did I realize that Tiger comes with wxWidgets 2.4. Maybe getting and installing 2.6 was unnecessary. And then I found that it comes with DarwinPorts anyway. Damn, how could I be so careless as to miss this?
While building, I had trouble with libFLAC. Not being a big fan of FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), I decided to disable it. It took me a while to figure out that I had to pass both --without-flac and --disable-flac to configure.
Even then, compilation aborted: msgfmt was not found. {WTF What The Fuck} is that? Something involving .mo and .po files. I googled a bit and found my suspicion confirmed: GNU getttext. Installed that from DarwinPorts, finished building Audacity, started it, opened an MP3 file, everything seemed to work, tried to play it back: Got a second of noise and then silence. For all the MP3 files I tried.
AAAAARGH!
Ok, I’m deinstalling it all. All this time wasted. Makes a grown man want to cry.
In the mean time, command-line MP3 editor cutmp3 looks interesting. DarwinPorts includes mp3splt which is what I’m going to try next, after trying Audion and looking for mEdit. Both of them not really FreeSoftware. Just Freeware. And Abandonware, too. Oh well.
Back to free software! It turns out that mp3splt of OSX is a command-line tool only with no interactive use, but *cutmp3 does what I need*! It takes a bit getting used to the interface, but I think I was able to cut an interesting minute from a sound file that we’ll be using as a ringtone for Claudia’s mobile phone.
Hurray!
#Software #Mac #Audacity
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My track-trimming tool of choice is Sweep.
– MichaelOlson 2006-08-12 15:17 UTC
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Hm, Sweep looks useful. It doesn’t seem to be in DarwinPorts, however. We need a volunteer! ;)
– Alex Schroeder 2006-08-12 19:56 UTC
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It seems that Audacity 1.3.3 beta is working well on our Mac Mini. We’re giving it another try…
– Alex Schroeder 2007-06-29 22:07 UTC