Can't consistently record with pulse as playback in Debian

So if I have pulse as my playback device Audacity cannot consistently, or at times at all, record. The recording just freezes after a few seconds or a few dozen seconds… I can press stop and record again but the same thing happens time and time again, every single time I try to record.
If I switch the playback device to Alsa my recordings are incredibly choppy, like the mic is being turned on for .1 seconds, off for .1 seconds, etc etc.

Everytime the recording freezes I am seeing this:

Expression ‘err’ failed in ‘src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c’, line: 2627
Expression ‘ContinuePoll( self, StreamDirection_In, &pollTimeout, &pollCapture )’ failed in ‘src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c’, line: 3152
Expression ‘PaAlsaStream_WaitForFrames( stream, &framesAvail, &xrun )’ failed in ‘src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c’, line: 3522


I’ve noticed this only happens when recording my second or later track. The first track will record forever no problems but as soon as I hit stop and press record again to continue on a new track this starts happened every time.

Hmm, switched the recording device to pulse and this fixed it

I was using alsa before because I wasnt’ getting any volume out of pulse but opening up my recording devices I saw that pulse was defaulting to hdmi for it’s input for no apparent reason…