On Ubuntu 13.10 (and possibly other systems with the default compiler flag -Werror=format-security) the gem native extension will fail to build. You can get around this by installing with gem install ruby-audio --with-cflags=-Wno-error=format-security but I suppose the C-extension should be updated to not cause a security error (or at least a note added somewhere, I'm not a C expert so not sure what really should be done to remedy).