[Audacity-devel] Audacity compiled with defaults cannot find LADSPA plug-ins.

[Steve t. F. <ste...@gm...>]

On Ubuntu and OpenSUSE 64 (and probably  many other distributions), if
Audacity is compiled with the default settings, LADSPA plug-ins that
have been installed from the repositories with the package manager
(the normal way to install most LADSPA plug-ins) will not be available
in Audacity.

The reason is that by default Audacity is installed to /usr/local/ and
so looks in /usr/local/lib/ladspa/ for LADSPA plug-ins. However, by
default, LADSPA plug-ins are installed to /usr/lib/ladspa/ on Ubuntu
and to /usr/lib64/ladspa/ on OpenSuse 64, and so are not found.

There are several workarounds to solve this, including (for Ubuntu):
* Configure Audacity with --prefix=/usr/
* Edit the .desktop file to include the LADSPA_PATH environmental variable
* Run "export LADSPA_PATH=/usr/lib/ladspa" from the command line prior
to launching Audacity
* Add "LADSPA_PATH=$LADSPA_PATH:/usr/lib/ladspa" to the ~/.bashrc file.
* Add "LADSPA_PATH=$LADSPA_PATH:/usr/lib/ladspa" to the /etc/environment file
(for OpenSuse 64 the LADSPA_PATH needs to include /usr/lib64/ladspa )

I've added a brief mention of this in the manual, but I don't think
that we can cover all of the options.
http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/FAQ:Installation_and_Plug-Ins#LinuxPlugIns

It is probably quite common that users will not want to install their
source code build of Audacity in /usr/.
If the user has a lot of LADSPA plug-ins installed (for other
applications) then it's quite likely that they will want to set the
LADSPA search path to somewhere other than /usr/lib/ladspa (as many
LADSPA plug-ins do not work with Audacity).

I've been unable to find any way to configure Audacity (other than
--prefix=/usr/) so that it looks in the right place for LADSPA
plug-ins.
Is there a configure option that I've missed that will tell Audacity
where to look for LADSPA plug-ins?
If not, (for the manual) what would be the recommended solution(s)?

Steve