The input audio is not always recorded

Recently I wrote an article ((t is in Russian) regarding Linux sound, and a person named webhamster mentioned that he has a problem with Audacity. Each time he tries to record an audio track there is approximately 30% chance that it won’t record.

I asked him to reproduce this problem, and here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKQf-09lBUo

Go to ~4:30, the failure is shown on the video.

According to the comments to my article this bug is at least reproducible in Debian Stable (Squeeze) and Ubuntu 12.04. Maybe it is somehow related to the used audio card (one of the reporters uses ESI Juli@, but, in another hand, I have this audio card, too, and such error doesn’t happen on my machine).

Anyway, thanks for checking that out.

It would be good to know if you amplified that dead track, if it was really dead, or just very, very low.

We have no idea what you’re recording. A microphone plugged into the side of the laptop? Stereo-Mix? Stereo Mix is something of a nightmare to fix because it’s a recursive sound pathway.

"How come my speaker volume affects my recordings?

Koz

Without a lot more information it is hard to comment. The problem could be anything.
We don’t know which version of Audacity, whether they are using PulseAudio, Jack, ALSA, OSS4, whether the problem is reproducible in other software …
It could be something as basic as a bad microphone connection.
I don’t have this problem on Debian Squeeze.