Audacity OpenVINO plugins: Linux Mint setup guide

This tutorial walks through installing Intel's OpenVINO AI plugins for Audacity on Linux Mint 22 using a snap package. The speaker uses a Tiger Lake laptop with integrated graphics. The suite covers noise suppression, music separation and generation, Whisper transcription, and audio super resolution. According to the speaker, processing runs on the user's hardware without a cloud service or subscription.

The setup starts by renaming Mint's file that blocks Snap, then installing snapd and rebooting. The Audacity snap includes the compiled plugins, but the models require a separate download. Viewers can fetch the full set or select individual models through an interactive menu. The speaker reports about 6.2 GB for all models and a download time of roughly 45 minutes on their connection.

For Intel GPU access, the guide adds the user to the render group. It also covers the intel-npu-driver snap for Meteor Lake and later hardware with an NPU. In Audacity, viewers check that mod-openvino is enabled and restart the app. The speaker advises declining direct ALSA access on Mint 22 because it uses PipeWire and reports problems when granting that access.

One troubleshooting detail remains anecdotal: running music generation once appeared to make the other plugins work on the speaker's machine. The demonstration ends with noise suppression applied to the video's voiceover.