Audacity, and avoiding the trap in NO MP3 support, in Fedora

There are 2 versions in Fedora for Audacity install - the free and non-free.

If you want to be able to import audio in the MP3 format (there may be other formats other than MP3 that are supported), make sure you select the non-free version of Audacity in the Software list, named:
audacity-freeworld-2.0.0-1.fc18

as opposed to the free version I installed named
audacity-2.0.2-2.fc18

Correcting my mistake of installing the free version of Audacity, I first suspected to add MP3 codecs support in my system doing this (gotten from a DuckDuckGo search):

su -
yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly

Yes, it did find some packages to download, and yes, it did install.  This probably worked because I already installed the RPMFusion package beforehand (see my earlier post).
 
But it didn't fix the problem: going back to Audacity and attempting a MP3 import still produced the error message, "This version of Audacity was not compiled with mp3 support."

This fixed the problem, based on a tip found in the Fedora Forums.

su - 

yum remove audacity
yum install audacity-nonfree

Some video to audio to mobile music player stuff

Having a video file downloaded from the Internet as mp4

Objective: to make it simply as an audio file, to be able to play in my phone.

Packages needed: handbrake-gtk, audacity

1. Open the mp4 file with handbrake (screenshot example)

2. Go over the Audio tab and change the following values:
Codec -> MP3 (lame)
Bitrate -> 320
3. Click the Start button to begin conversion to m4v (MPEG-4 video) format.
4. When the conversion completes, close handbrake app, open audacity.
5. Click File - Import - Audio
6. Select the m4v file created. Importing completes (screenshot example)

7. Click File - Export
8. Select the M4A (AAC) Files (FFmpeg) format, then click Save.
9. Exit audacity, no need to save the project.

Here are the sample files, notice difference in file types and sizes (screenshot example).

Proceed to upload the m4a file to your phone.

Audacity in Ubuntu 10.04

Make sure you have installed the ubuntu restricted package first.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

Then to install audacity:

sudo apt-get install audacity libmp3lame0