Victory!

Let me tell you about the time I had installing LameLib on my computer last night! It all started when I did a sound test of the first chapter of Grizelda on Audacity and I wanted to export it to an mp3 so I could share it with the folks at the Podiobooks community. The computer tells me I need LameLib to do this. So after extensive poking around on the Audacity website, I find the LameLib download page.

There are two different versions of LameLib for Macintoshes, depending on whether yours has an Intel or a Power PC chip inside it. Even after the dust has settled, I'm still not sure what kind of a chip is inside my computer. I downloaded both versions, just to be safe, and proceeded to try to open the Power PC version with Stuffit Expander.

No dice.

The little progress bar gets to about 2/3 of the way to finish and stops there in cryogenic stasis. The same thing happens with the Intel chip version, except that it gets to about 3/4 of the way. Cancelling the Stuffit doesn't work either, and eventually I had to turn my computer off with the emergency shutoff.

Finally I figured out that it wasn't working because I had version 11 of Stuffit Expander, not version 12. Off I went to the Stuffit Expander people website, where I had to sign up on their mailing list to get the new version. I happily opened the .dmg and dragged it onto my hard drive. Only then did I read the "Before you install Stuffit..." notice that went with it. "Quit all running Stuffit programs and delete the old version of Stuffit before installing," it said. True to form, when I tried to open my LameLib files, the computer tells me that unexpected error -12000 has occurred. Oh, my God, I killed the computer!

After a few moments of panic, I deleted Lamelib and both versions of Stuffit, restarted the computer, and redownloaded everything. I installed Stuffit, opened LameLib, and to my relief, it opened. LameLib works, too: I did finally manage to export that file as an mp3.