Q I recently bought an Ion Turntable to import records into my computer. The supplied Audacity software says it cannot export them as MP3 files without the Lame encoder. I tried downloading this from the Ion website but didn’t have any success.
William Risk

A The Lame encoder is available from other websites, and when we found the correct page on the Ion site it forwarded us to the Audacity website.

It is simple to find and install the file and these instructions work with all versions of Audacity, whether supplied with an Ion product or downloaded directly.

Click the link above to download Lame MP3 Encoder and download the file labelled ‘For Audacity on Windows’. The file name will be libmp3lame-win-3.98.2.zip, but the numbers may change if a new version is released.

Open the file when it has downloaded and copy the lame_enc.dll file to a convenient location. It needs to stay there so the Desktop is not a good idea. My Documents is a much better choice.

Once the file is there, start Audacity. Click on the Edit menu and then Preferences. Click on the File Formats tab, the third from the left, and then on the Find Library button. Click on Yes in the message that appears and find the lame_enc.dll file. Click on it once and then on the Open button.

It is also a good idea to increase the bit rate to either 256 or 320, as show above, to improve the quality of the finished MP3 tracks.