Audacity Forum

Thanks! You sent me in the right direction. Logging out and then in didn't do any good, but a complete reboot did the trick. I'm guessing that something hadn't relinquished the audio device?

Correct, no PulseAudio. I've been avoiding it, and hope not to have to deal with it, although I will if I have to. I hadn't noticed the devices section of the help menu before. Here it is. ============================== Default capture device number: 6 Default playback device number: 6 =============...

I asked this question on the Gentoo forums, but so far nobody there has any answers, so I'm hoping for some insight here. Audacity launches fine from either the menu or the command line, and all functions seem to work fine -- except playback. I can edit the waveform, apply effects, zoom in, zoom out...