Step-by-step:

• Download the compiled ffmpeg with libmp3lame support (direct download links: older version ffmpeg.with.lame and newer version ffmpeg.2007-10-28.with-libmp3lame-support).
• Rename the downloaded executable file to “ffmpeg” (no extension), upload it to the directory on your server (in this example /home/myusername/).
• Download libmp3lame.so.0.
• Upload libmp3lame.so.0 to the same directory where you placed ffmpeg in.
• Create a php file with the following code (remember to change the paths to your own, where you actually uploaded binaries in previous steps):
  1. <?php
  2. exec("export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/myusername/");
  3. echo passthru("/home/myusername/ffmpeg -formats");
  4. ?>
• If you access that PHP file with your browser, you should be able to see a list of formats which are supported by ffmpeg, and if you find “EA libmp3lame” somewhere in the output, then it means you now can Encode Audio in libmp3lame!
• If that doesn’t work for you: LD_LIBRARY_PATH can be a protected variable in PHP (you can check for this by searching for the “safe_mode_protected_env_vars” value in phpinfo() output). The workaround here can be to write your commands to a file from php, then chmod that file with 0755 permissions (rwx-rx-rx), and run the file through exec(). In this way, PHP is not changing the LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but telling the server to run a file, which tells the server to change it. This method worked for the original author of these instructions.

For passing arguments to the PHP wrapper script – check out PHP’s $argv variable (more on this here). If you decided to use shell-script as a wrapper for “export LD_LIBRARY_PATH”, then using $1, $2 etc will allow you to pass parameters to the shell script, e.g. in the example below

you could pass “input file” as first argument, “parameters” as second and “output file” as third to make such a wrapper script work.

I found the reason at debianhelp.org forums. Basically, it’s the PC speaker module (pcspr) not functioning correctly. I suspect this problem manifests itself only on some types of laptops. The solution is either to somehow reconfigure the pcspkr module, or just disable it. More on how to disable the module below.

First of all, boot into console-only mode or even single-user mode. On my install GRUB loader, configured by the Debian Installer, had an option in the boot menu to boot into single-user mode.

Remember, that any sound emission attempt will freeze your computer in this scenario. So avoid any actions, which might generate a system beep. These actions include (but are in no way limited to): using TAB filename/command autocompletion, using up/down arrows in command line when there is nothing in the history above or below the current command, etc.

After successfully booting, remove the pcspkr module: modprobe -r pcspkr (if that doesn’t work, try rmmod pcspkr). Note, that this command only removes pcspkr module for the current session, and the module will be loaded again on next boot.

To permanently disable the pcspkr module, you can blacklist it. To do so, add the line blacklist pcspkr to the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.local file. If this file does not exist, you can create it.

On my system I already had /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file, so I also added blacklist pcspkr line to that file. I did not check which one actually worked for me, but on the next boot pcspkr didn’t load.

I also did one more thing – configured console not to beep. This is done in /etc/inputrc file by uncommenting the following line: set bell-style visible (or you can uncomment set bell-style none to have absolutely no bell notifications).

There’s also a method to disable IPv6 module, which can be adopted for the pcspkr module. However, I didn’t use it – methods listed above helped me.

References other than already cited: how to disable PC speaker, how to disable PC speaker in Etch.